Abstract

In this study, we seek to characterise the behaviour of Spatial modulation (SM) in the multiple access scenario. By only activating a single transmit antenna for any transmission, SM entirely avoids inter-channel interference, requires no synchronisation between the transmit antennas and a single radio frequency chain at the transmitter. Most contributions thus far have only addressed aspects of SM for a point-to-point communication system. We propose a maximum-likelihood (ML) detector which can successfully decode incoming data from multiple simultaneous transmissions and does not suffer from the near-far problem. We analyse the performance of the interference-unaware and interference-aware detectors. We look at the behaviour of SM as the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio goes to infinity and compare it to the complexity and cost equivalent single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) system. Two systems are considered to be equivalent in terms of complexity if their respective detection algorithms are of the same order in notation. Simulation results show that the interference-aware SM detector performs better than the complexity equivalent multi-user ML-SIMO detector by at least 3 dB at an average bit-error-ratio of 10⁻³.