Double spatial modulation: A high-rate index modulation scheme for MIMO systems

In this paper, a new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission technique, which is called double spatial modulation (DSM), is proposed as a new high-rate generalized spatial modulation (SM) scheme. DSM scheme aims to improve the spectral efficiency of classical SM by increasing the number of active transmit antennas. In the DSM scheme, incoming data bits determine two modulated symbols as well as their corresponding activated transmit antenna indices. One of the modulated symbols is directly transmitted over its corresponding activated transmit antenna, while the other one is transmitted with a rotation angle, which is optimized for M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) signal constellation, over the second activated transmit antenna. The error performance of the proposed DSM scheme is compared with the recently proposed emerging SM schemes such as quadrature SM (QSM) and enhanced SM (ESM). Our computer simulations show that the DSM scheme provides considerably better error performance than QSM and ESM schemes for different spectral efficiency values. In addition, the pairwise error probability (PEP) of DSM is derived and the average bit error probability (ABEP) over uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels is obtained for different M-QAM constellations.