Multi-user detection for spatial modulation toward 5G wireless communications

Spatial modulation (SM) is a class of novel multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques toward future wireless communications, which activates only one transmit antenna in each time slot, so as to reduce the number of RF chains for saving the implement cost. Meanwhile, considering its application in 5G systems with multiple users, the detection of multi-user spatial modulation has drawn greater attention. In this paper, a pair of efficient detectors are proposed for multi-user spatial modulation. Specially, a threshold-aided approximate message passing (T-AMP) detector is proposed with the purpose of reducing the computational complexity of traditional structured approximate message passing (Str-AMP) detector. In addition, a novel probability sorting aided approximate message passing detector, called probability- ranking-aided AMP detector (P-AMP), is also proposed with the purpose of improving the performance. Simulation results show that the proposed T-AMP detector is able to achieve similar performance as traditional Str- AMP with lower complexity, while the proposed P-AMP detector exhibits a better symbol error rate (SER) performance with similar complexity.