Spatial Modulation for RIS-Assisted Uplink Communication: Joint Power Allocation and Passive Beamforming Design

In this paper, we investigate the uplink communication of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted system, in which an user equipment (UE) with single radio frequency (RF) chain delivers information to an access point (AP) by adopting the spatial modulation (SM). Specifically, we first investigate the transmit SM (TSM) scheme and jointly optimize the UE’s power allocation matrix and the RIS reflection coefficients to enhance the system reliability. We formulate a non-convex optimization problem to reduce the system symbol-error-rate (SER) and propose a novel penalty-alternative optimizing algorithm to obtain a near-optimal solution. Following this, we show that with the assistant of RIS, receive SM (RSM) scheme can also be performed even if the UE has only one RF chain. Based on this observation, a novel RIS-assisted RSM scheme is proposed, which can provide a low cost and complexity solution for system realization. The reflection coefficients of the RIS are also optimized for the proposed RSM. Numerical results show that the RIS-assisted TSM can achieve a lower SER than the conventional communication scheme (CTS) without SM and the proposed RSM scheme has lower detection complexity than that of CTS. It is also shown that the performance of the TSM and RSM schemes is more sensitive to the quantization accuracy of the phase of the RIS coefficients than that of the amplitude.