Spatial Modulation for Generalized MIMO: Challenges, Opportunities and Implementation

A key challenge of future mobile communications research is to strike an attractive compromise between wireless network’s area spectral-efficiency and energy-efficiency. This necessitates a clean-slate approach to wireless system design, embracing the rich body of existing knowledge especially on Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) technologies. This motivates the proposal of an emerging wireless communications concept conceived for single-RF large-scale MIMO communications, which is termed as Spatial Modulation (SM). The concept of SM has established itself as a beneficial transmission paradigm, subsuming numerous members of the MIMO system-family. The research of SM has reached sufficient maturity to motivate its comparison to state-of-the-art MIMO communications, as well as to inspire its application to other emerging wireless systems such as relay-aided, cooperative, small-cell, optical wireless and power