Transmitter Design and Hardware Considerations for Different Space Modulation Techniques

Space modulation techniques (SMTs), in which some or all of the data bits modulate a block of spatial constellation symbol, are promising candidates for future 5G wireless systems. They promise data rate enhancements while maintaining low energy consumption, hardware cost, and computational complexity. As such, they attracted significant research interest in the past few years. One of the major assets of SMTs is the assumption that they can operate with a single RF chain at the transmitter even though multiple antennas might be activated at one time instant. Thus far, this claim is anticipated in several research articles but the transmitter designs of the different SMTs with a single RF chain are not addressed yet in the literature. SMTs include different system configurations, such as spatial modulation, space shift keying, quadrature spatial modulation, and quadrature space shift keying. The required hardware components to implement a transmitter for each of these systems with the minimum number of RF-chains are discussed in this paper. In addition, hardware limitations and the impact of different hardware blocks on the overall system performance are discussed. Besides, a comparison among different schemes along with conventional spatial multiplexing algorithm in terms of power consumption, hardware cost, probability of error, and receiver computational complexity is presented. It is shown that some of these techniques can operate without any RF-chain while a single-RF chain is sufficient for other systems. Moreover, these schemes can be traded off in terms of energy savings, complexity, performance, and cost.