BER Performance of Spatial Modulation Systems Under a Non-Stationary Massive MIMO Channel Model

Abstract

In this paper, the bit error rate (BER) performance of spatial modulation (SM) systems is investigated both theoretically and by simulation in a non-stationary Kronecker-based massive multipleinput-multiple-output (MIMO) channel model in multi-user (MU) scenarios. Massive MIMO SM systems are considered in this paper using both a time-division multiple access (TDMA) scheme and a block diagonalization (BD) based precoding scheme, for different system settings. Their performance is compared with a vertical Bell labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) architecture based system and a conventional channel inversion system. It is observed that a higher cluster evolution factor can result in better BER performance of SM systems due to the low correlation among sub-channels. Compared with the BD-SM system, the SM system using the TDMA scheme obtains a better BER performance but with a much lower total system data rate. The BD-MU-SM system achieves the best trade-off between the data rate and the BER performance among all of the systems considered. When compared with the V-BLAST system and the channel inversion system, SM approaches offer advantages in performance for MU massive MIMO systems.INDEX TERMS Spatial modulation, massive MIMO, bit error rate, block diagonalization precoding, nonstationary Kronecker-based channel model.