Two-Layer Coded Spatial Modulation With Block Markov Superposition Transmission

This paper is concerned with the spatial modulation (SM), a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission technique, that maps information bits not only into the conventional two-dimensional signal points but also into the indices of active transmit antennas. We present a two-layer coded SM scheme, in which the spatial bits carried by the antenna indices and the signal bits carried by the conventional signals are protected separately by two error correction codes. For the ease of decoding process, the code rates are allocated according to the chain rule of the mutual information. We choose block Markov superposition transmission (BMST) codes for each layer, since they are easily designed for any given code rate with a predictable performance lower bound. An iterative sliding-window decoding algorithm is also presented by exchanging messages iteratively between the two BMST decoders and the soft-in soft-out (SISO) demapper of the SM. To reduce the computational complexity, we propose to implement the SISO demapping algorithm by employing only partial soft inputs. Numerical results show that the BMST-SM system performs well over uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels.