Zero Forcing Assisted Single Layer Beamforming for Spatial Modulation MIMO Systems

A zero forcing (ZF) assisted single layer beamforming is developed for spatial modulation (SM) and space shift keying (SSK) modulation multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems, termed as SZF-SM/SZF-SSK, to achieve both transmit beamforming and receive diversity gain in this paper. Specifically, the proposed SZF-SM/SZF-SSK maps part of the bits to spatial domain, simultaneously forming a ZF precoding assisted single layer data both in multiple input single output (MISO) and MIMO systems, that differs greatly from conventional ZF beamforming assisted MIMO systems. With MISO configuration, the ZF precoder of SZF-SM/SZF-SSK converges to the maximum ratio transmission (MRT), achieving only the transmit beamforming gain. With MIMO configuration, SZF-SM/SZF-SSK tranceiver could be further modified along with the MIMO channel to achieve single layer transmission and joint detection, attaining both the transmit beamforming and receive diversity gain in SM-MIMO system. The theoretical analysis and the simulation results of the proposed SZF-SM/SZF-SSK with MISO and MIMO configurations are presented in this paper respectively, which show an attractive performance gain over the conventional SM/SSK. Compared with the conventional ZF beamforming assisted MIMO systems and some other CSI assisted SM-MIMO schemes, the proposed scheme exhibits better performance, especially under highly correlated MIMO channels, rendering a new and practical way to achieve low rank MIMO transmission with good performance and high data rate.