2396
11, NOVEMBER 2017
A Spatial Modulation With Space-Phase Constellation for
Spatially Correlated Channels
Yongjin Ahn, Hoondong Noh, and Chungyong Lee, Member, IEEE
Abstract— We design a spatial modulation (SM) scheme for
spatially correlated channels under the constraints of a single
radio frequency chain transmitter and open-loop transmission.
To alleviate the performance degradation of the conventional SM
in highly correlated channels, the proposed SM scheme adopts
the antenna grouping and a new space-phase constellation, which
is designed by considering the phase-only constraint and received
symbol distance in fully correlated channels. In the simulation
results, the proposed scheme achieves about 2.5-dB gain at bit
error rate of 10−3 compared with the conventional SM in highly
correlated channels.
Index Terms— Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), spatial
modulation, spatially correlated channel, analog precoding.
I. I NTRODUCTION
S PATIAL modulation (SM) is one of the most promising
modulation schemes to support multiple-input multiple-
output (MIMO) systems with low complexity [1]. There are
two main advantages of SM in MIMO systems. Since the
spatial domain resource is used to generate symbol constel-
lation in SM, the comparable performance to the conventional
amplitude/phase modulation techniques can be achieved with
open-loop transmission or limited feedback systems [2].
In addition, considering that the SM transmitter activates only
a single antenna per symbol, it can be implemented with
a single radio frequency (RF) chain enabling a low cost
implementation of MIMO systems.
However, it is well known that spatial correlation is existed
in MIMO channels due to the insufficient antenna spacing in
fixed physical spaces and the sparse scattering environments in
practice [3]. The transmit spatial correlation causes significant
performance degradation in SM, since the receiver detects SM
symbols based on the channel difference between transmit
antennas [4]. To overcome the transmit antenna correlation
problem, various generalized SM (GSM) schemes [5]–[7] have
been investigated. Although the optimized precoding for GSM
was given by [5], it requires high computational complexity,
additional RF chains and CSI at transmitter (CSIT). For
practical usage, the GSM schemes with partial CSIT [6], [7]
were proposed. However, these GSM schemes still require
additional RF chains to improve the performance in correlated
channels. Considering the number of RF chains, the analog
beamforming based SM [8] was proposed. Though a single
Manuscript received July 16, 2017; accepted August 12, 2017. Date of
publication August 17, 2017; date of current version November 9, 2017. The
associate editor coordinating the review of this letter and approving it for
publication was G. Kaddoum. (Corresponding author: Chungyong Lee.)
Y. Ahn and C. Lee are with the Department of Electrical and Elec-
tronic Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, South Korea (e-mail:
anyjean@csp.yonsei.ac.kr; cylee@yonsei.ac.kr).
H. Noh is with Samsung Electronics, Seoul 06765, South Korea (e-mail:
hoondong.noh@samsung.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2017.2740921
1558-2558 © 2017 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 21, NO.
RF chain transmitter was implemented, it exploits the char-
acteristic of millimeter wave channels and requires full CSIT.
To alleviate the antenna correlation without CSIT, the GSM
with antenna grouping [9] was proposed. However, the perfor-
mance of [9] is inferior to the conventional SM in uncorrelated
channels, since the minimum Euclidean distance of symbols
does not considered.
In this letter, we propose a novel SM scheme for spatially
correlated channels which does not require CSIT and addi-
tional RF chins. By adopting a new space-phase constellation
and the antenna grouping, the proposed SM is inherently
robust to antenna correlation. Simulation results show that the
proposed scheme has better BER performance in correlated
channels than the conventional SM.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
Consider a MIMO system with Nt transmit antennas and
Nr receive antennas for a point-to-point downlink transmis-
sion. Assuming that a symbol x is transmitted through a
narrow band flat fading channel H, the received signal can
be expressed as
y = Hx + n, (1)
where n is a complex white Gaussian noise
 with zero mean and
variance σn2 and x should satisfy E x2 = 1. For the spatial
correlation channel model, Kronecker model is assumed:
1/2 1/2
H = R R Hw R T , (2)
where Hw denotes a white flat-fading channel whose elements
are independent and identically distributed complex gaussian
values in CN (0, 1) and R R and RT are receive and transmit
correlation matrices, respectively. For the sake of simplicity,
the one-ring channel model [10] is adopted with R R = I Nr and
RT is based on the exponential correlation model in uniform
linear array [11]. The r -th row and c-th column of RT is
given by
RT (r, c) = ρ |r−c| , (3)
where ρ is a correlation coefficient 0 ≤ ρ ≤ 1.
In the conventional SM, the symbol x is defined as follows:

m = 1, . . . , M
xi,m = ei · qm , (4)
i = 1, . . . , Nt
where ei is the i -th standard unit vector in Nt dimensions
and qm indicates an M-ary QAM constellation. The spectral
efficiency of the conventional SM is given by
R = log2 (Nt M) bps/Hz. (5)
When the optimal maximum likelihood (ML) detector is
employed, the average bit error probability (ABEP) upper
AHN et al.: SM WITH SPACE-PHASE CONSTELLATION FOR SPATIALLY CORRELATED CHANNELS 2397

where 0 ≤ φn,k ≤ 2π. Then, the spectral efficiency of the

proposed transmitter can be expressed as
R = log2 (L · M) + log2 (N L ) = log2 (Nt M) bps/Hz. (9)
Therefore, the proposed structure can have the same spectral
efficiency of the conventional SM and can be implemented
with a single RF chain and additional analog devices. For the
detection of the proposed transmit symbol, the ML receiver
structure is easily adopted such as
 2
 
[an , ei , qm ] = arg min y − Hxn̂,î,m̂  . (10)
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the proposed SM transmitter. n̂,î,m̂

bound of SM is given by [9]

  B. Design of the Constellation of the Space-Phase
1  N i, î , m, m̂ Modulation
P̄b ≤   Nr , (6) To design the space-phase constellation for spatially corre-
2 R+1 R  
i,m î,m̂ detI Nt + √1 RT vv H  lated channels, maximizing the minimum Euclidean distance
2 2σn2
between received symbols or minimizing the ABEP could be
where N represents the number of bits in error between the
considered [12]. Since the ABEP is a function of correlation
symbol pairs and v = xî,m̂ − xi,m .
matrix and noise variance, it is not suitable for the open-
III. P ROPOSED S PATIAL M ODULATION FOR S PATIALLY loop transmission. Thus, we will maximize the minimum
C ORRELATED C HANNELS Euclidean distance of received symbols assuming the fully
correlated channel. Also, we constrained that the Euclidean
We aim to design an SM transmitter, which is robust against distance of the proposed transmit symbols is equal to that of
the transmit correlation. To avoid the high correlation between the conventional SM for the same performance in uncorrelated
adjacent antennas, the antenna grouping method is considered. channels.
For the GSM with grouping method [9], the antenna correla- To have the same Euclidean distance of the conventional
tion is just alleviated by applying multiple SM transmitters into SM symbols, the proposed SM symbols should satisfy
multiple antenna groups. To enhance robustness to antenna  2  2
correlation, a new space-phase modulator is deployed to each    
xi,m − xî,m̂  = xn,i,m − xn̂,î,m̂  . (11)
antenna group, which can be implemented without additional
RF chains. By the new space-phase constellation, the loss By substituting (4) and (7) into (11), the constraint (11) is
of data rate caused by the antenna grouping is compensated satisfied when the constellation symbol of the space-phase
and the BER performance in highly correlated channels is modulation satisfies the following property:
improved.
an H · an̂ = 0, ∀n = n̂. (12)
A. Structure of the Proposed SM Transmitter Therefore,
 if we define
 the space-phase constellation as
As shown in Fig. 1, we assume that a spatial modulator A = a1 , . . . , a N L , then A H A = I N L . There are many
activates one of L space-phase modulators with log2 L bits. solutions satisfying both the phase-only constraint and the
Each space-phase modulator equips N L = Nt /L equal gain orthogonal condition. Thus, we will find the space-phase
antennas and phase shifters, which can be implemented with constellation, which is inherently robust to transmit spatial
only analog devices without additional RF chains. The space- correlation. When the fully correlated channel is assumed,
phase modulator modulates log2 N L bits to compensate the loss such as ρ = 1, the Euclidean distance between received
of data rate at the spatial modulator. The total transmit symbol symbols can be rewritten as
is defined as N 2
  2  R 
Nt 
L    

 H(xn,i,m −xn̂,î,m̂ ) =  αc (xn,i,m (r )−xn̂,î,m̂ (r )) ,
⎡ ⎤  
an 0 ··· 0 ⎧ c=1 r=1
⎢ .. .. ⎥ ⎪
⎨m = 1, . . . , M (13)
⎢ 0 an . . ⎥
xn,i,m = ⎢
⎢ ..
⎥·ei ·qm ,
⎥ i = 1, . . . , L , where x(r ) is defined as the r -th element of x and
⎣ .. .. ⎪
⎩n = 1, . . . , N
. . . 0 ⎦ L 
Nt
0 ··· 0 an αc = √1N Hw (r, c). Since the channel response vectors
t
r=1
(7) according to transmit antenna index are same in the fully
where ei denotes the i -th standard unit vector in L dimensions, correlated channel, the antenna index i can be ignored. Then,
qm represents an M-ary QAM constellation symbol and an is a the effective symbol distance can be expressed as
 2
constellation symbol of the space-phase modulation satisfying  NL 
 
1  j φn,1 j φn,2 T 
 (xn,m ( p) − xn̂,m̂ ( p)) . (14)
an = √ e ,e , . . . , e j φn,k , . . . e j φn,N L , (8)  p=1 
NL
2398 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 21, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2017

For an M-ary QAM constellation symbol, we consider only Algorithm 1 Sub-Optimal Space-Phase Constellation
the finite case, since qm is a fixed scalar value. Thus, we can of (20)
define a set of the effective symbol distance as  M
Require: N L , Q and   #
⎧ 2 ⎫   
⎨
⎪    ⎪   NL 
NL
  s = qm qm̂ ⎬ 1: construct  = a a( p) ∈  Q ,  a( p) > 0
d = 
A  
(an ( p) − s · an̂, ( p))  . (15)   p=1 
⎪
⎩p=1  ∀n = n̂, ∀m, m̂ ⎪
⎭ 2: choose a1 randomly in 
3: for n = 2, . . . , N L do
Since the BER performance of the ML detection depends
4: initialization: dmin = 0
on the minimum distance of symbols, we maximize the
A = mi n(d A ). 5: while at mp ∈ , ∀ do
minimum distance of d A , which is defined as dmin
6: At mp = [a1 , a2 , . . . , an−1 , at mp ]
Specially, when the symbol x satisfies Atm p
7: calculate dmin in (15)

NL Atm p
xn,m ( p) = 0, (16) 8: if At mp At mp = In and dmin
H >dmin then
p=1
9: an = at mp
Atm p
10: dmin = dmin
the received signal power will be zero, which implies that
11: end if
we cannot detect the symbol of qm . To prevent this problem,
12: end while
we consider an additional condition for the space-phase con-
stellation. Since qm is a scalar value, we can omit the index m 13: end for
in (16). Then, the condition, which does not satisfy (16), can 14: A = At mp
be expressed as
  C. Complexity of the Proposed Spatial Modulation
 NL 
 
 an ( p) > 0, ∀n. (17) For the transmitter, since the proposed space-phase mod-

 p=1  ulator modifies only the phase of N L antennas with analog
phase shifters, it does not require additional computations
Now, we consider (12), (15) and (17) together to design a compared with the conventional SM transmitter. For the ML
space-phase constellation. Then, the design problem can be receiver, the proposed scheme requires the additional N L Nt Nr
written as complex multiplications and (N L − 1)Nt Nr complex addi-
A
max dmin tions in calculating the multiplication of channel matrix and
A symbol vector, while the GSM schemes [5], [12] require the
subject to A H A = I N L , A(r, c) ∈ e j φr,c , ∀r, c additional Nt2 Nr complex multiplications and (Nt − 1)Nt Nr
 
 NL  complex additions. Thus, the proposed scheme has less receive
 
 an ( p) > 0, ∀n. (18) complexity than the GSM schemes, since N L < Nt . Though

 p=1  the optimal performance for the instantaneous CSI can not be
achieved by the proposed scheme, there is no feedback burden
However, it is well known that the phase-only constraint at receiver to transmit the proposed SM symbol.
A(r, c) ∈ e j φr,c is non-convex. Therefore, we approximate
the phase-only constraint by introducing the follow discrete IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
phase set: In this section, the BER performances of the proposed SM
!  " and the various conventional SM schemes were investigated
j 2πQq 
Q = e  q = 1, 2, . . . Q . (19) via Monte Carlo simulations. For the space-phase modulation,
we found the 2-bit constellation with the parameters N L = 4,
Finally, the alternative design problem is expressed as Q = 8 and M = 2 in Algorithm 1 such as
⎡√ √ √ ⎤
A
max dmin 2 −1 2 2
A ⎢ 4 (1 + j ) 2 4
(−1 + j ) (−1 + j )⎥
⎢√ √ √4 ⎥
subject to A H A = I N L , A(r, c) ∈  Q , ∀r, c ⎢ 2 1 2 2 ⎥
  ⎢ (1 + j ) (1 − j ) (−1 − j )⎥
  ⎢4 j ⎥
 NL

 A=⎢ ⎢ 1 √ 2 4 4 ⎥.
⎥
 an ( p) > 0, ∀n. (20) ⎢ 2 −1 1 ⎥
 p=1  ⎢ j (1 + j ) ⎥
⎢ 2 √ 4 2 2 ⎥
⎣ ⎦
Although the optimal solution of (20) can be found by the −1 2 −1 −1
j (−1 + j ) j
exhaustive search, it requires high computational complexity. 2 4 2 2
So, to find a sub-optimal solution effectively, we may adopt the (21)
greedy algorithm. The design of the proposed space-phase con- In order to compare the performance of the proposed scheme,
stellation is summarized in Algorithm 1. The construction of the conventional analog orthonormal precoding scheme [8]
the proposed space-phase constellation is gradually performed given by
by increasing the symbol index of the space-phase modulation. $ %T
1 − j 2π n−1 − j 2π 2(n−1) − j 2π (Nt −1)(n−1)
Also, each symbol of the space-phase modulation is selected an = √ 1, e Nt ,e Nt ,...,e Nt
to have the maximum dmin A and orthogonal property in the set Nt
of discrete phase vectors satisfying (17). (22)
AHN et al.: SM WITH SPACE-PHASE CONSTELLATION FOR SPATIALLY CORRELATED CHANNELS
Fig. 2. BER Performances of the conventional schemes and the proposed
scheme for uncorrelated channels.
Fig. 3. BER Performances of the conventional schemes and the proposed
scheme for correlated channels.
and the GSM with grouping [9] were considered for the same
constraints: single RF chain and open-loop transmission. The
analytical ABEP bound in (6) was also verified.
Fig. 2 shows the BER performances of the SM schemes in
uncorrelated channels. The system model parameters Nt = 16,
Nr = 6 and M = 2 were assumed, while Nt = 8,
Nr = 6, M = 2 and two interleaved groups were used in
the GSM with grouping scheme for the equal transmission
rate R = 5 bps/Hz. As we can see in Fig. 2, the BER
performances of the proposed SM and the SM with analog
precoding are almost same to that of the conventional SM. This
result verifies that the Euclidean distances of (21) and (22)
are same to that of the conventional SM. On the other
hand, the GSM with grouping scheme has the worse BER
performance than the conventional SM due to the smaller
minimum Euclidean distance of symbol vectors.
In Fig. 3, the BER performances of the SM schemes in
correlated channels with ρ = 0.8 was evaluated. Considering
the fixed size of the linear antenna array with different numbers
of transmit antennas, ρ = (0.8)2 was used in the GSM with
grouping scheme. The rest parameters were same as the case
of Fig. 2. In Fig. 3, we can find that the SM with analog
precoding shows poor BER performance in highly correlated
channels, because the orthonormal analog precoding vector
2399
in (22) does not consider the correlated channel conditions
in (14) and (16), such as

Nt 
Nt
− j 2π (k−1)(n−1)
an = e Nt = 0, ∀n = 1. (23)
k=1 k=1
The GSM with grouping scheme has better BER performance
than the conventional SM due to the antenna grouping. For the
proposed SM, there is about 2.5dB gain at BER = 10−3 com-
pared to the conventional SM. This improvement is achieved
by the antenna grouping and the space-phase constellation
which is inherently robust to antenna correlation.
V. C ONCLUSION
We proposed an SM scheme with space-phase constellation
to improve the performance degradation of the conventional
SM in correlated channels. By employing the space-phase
modulator, SM can be applied to antenna groups without
additional RF chains and loss of data rate. Also, to improve
the BER performance in correlated channels, the space-phase
constellation was designed to maximize the minimum received
symbol distance in the fully correlated channel. The simulation
result showed that the BER performance of the proposed SM
is better than that of the conventional SM schemes in highly
correlated channels.
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