Full-Duplex Quadrature Spatial Modulation for Multi-Antenna Systems

Devices with full-duplex (FD) radios are able to transmit and receive at the same time without requiring orthogonal resources, thereby creating strong self-interference (SI) that results from their own transmissions. Spatial modulation (SM), on the other hand, is a multi-antenna scheme that activates only one transmit antenna to send a data symbol, where the index of the activated antenna depends on the input bits. In this manner, additional data can be conveyed implicitly via the selection of the active transmit antenna. Quadrature spatial modulation (QSM) is a variant of SM, in which the quadrature components of the constellation symbol are separately modulated on the indices of the transmit antenna, leading to an increase in the data rate by implicitly encoding on the spatial domain. This article provides an overview of the research activity on FD-SM and proposes a novel FD-QSM scheme that exploits multiple antennas to achieve antenna cancellation at the receiving side to mitigate the SI signal. Assuming active cancellation mechanisms are also in place, the performance of FD-QSM is studied in the presence of residual SI (RSI). The results reveal that FD-QSM can provide more than 40 percent capacity gain over its half-duplex (HD) counterpart in the presence of strong RSI and roughly the same gain over HD spatial multiplexing (SMX)-based multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems with moderate RSI. When applied to the downlink of a cellular network, FD-QSM provides 2dB gain over FD-SM and 5dB gain over FD-MIMO, operating at the same spectral efficiency, while huge gains are observed when FD-QSM is applied to non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-aided FD relay network.