Quadrature Spatial Modulation Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing

Abstract

This paper investigates the application of quadrature spatial modulation (QSM) to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In comparison to spatial modulation OFDM (SM-OFDM), the proposed QSM-OFDM achieves an enhanced spectral efficiency by decomposing the amplitude and/or phase modulated signal into its real and imaginary components as the transmitted symbols. The index/indices of the activated transmit antenna(s) are employed to convey additional information. These symbols are transmitted orthogonally to eliminate inter-channel interference with little trade-off in synchronization. The average bit error probability for QSM-OFDM and other schemes, including the SM-OFDM, conventional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO-OFDM), maximal-ratio combining single-input multiple-output (MRC-OFDM), vertical Bell Laboratories layered space-time architecture (VBLAST-OFDM) and Alamouti-OFDM systems are demonstrated using Monte Carlo simulation. The expressions for the receiver computational complexities in terms of the number of real operations are further derived. QSM-OFDM yields a significant signal-to-noise ratio gain of  dB with little trade-off in computational complexity over SM-OFDM, while substantial gains greater than  dB are evident, when compared to other systems.