A Survey on Spatial Modulation in Emerging Wireless Systems: Research Progresses and Applications

TLDR

Spatial modulation is an innovative digital modulation technique that balances spectral and energy efficiency while offering numerous benefits for future wireless communications. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances and progress in spatial modulation research. SM conveys information through the ON/OFF states of transmit antennas, reducing RF chain requirements, and the survey details its fundamental principles, variants, enhancements, integration with other techniques, and extensions to emerging systems and multiple signal domains. The concept of spatial modulation can influence a wide range of applications and be applied across various signal domains, including frequency, time, code, angle, and combinations thereof.

Abstract

Spatial modulation (SM) is an innovative and promising digital modulation technology that strikes an appealing tradeoff between spectral efficiency and energy efficiency with a simple design philosophy. SM enjoys plenty of benefits and shows great potential to fulfill the requirements of future wireless communications. The key idea behind SM is to convey additional information typically through the ON/OFF states of transmit antennas and simultaneously save the implementation cost by reducing the number of radio-frequency chains. As a result, the SM concept can have widespread effects on diverse applications and can be applied in other signal domains, such as frequency/time/code/angle domain or even across multiple domains. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the latest results and progresses in SM research. Specifically, the fundamental principles, variants of system design, and enhancements of SM are described in detail. Furthermore, the integration of the SM family with other promising techniques, applications to emerging communication systems, and extensions to new signal domains are also extensively studied.