Spectral Efficiency Analysis for Spatial Modulation in Massive MIMO Uplink over Dispersive Channels

Abstract: Flat-fading channel models are usually invoked for analyzing the performance of massive spatial modulation multiple-input multiple-output (SM-MIMO) systems. However, in the context of broadband SM transmission, the severe inter-symbol-interference (ISI) caused by the frequency-selective fading channels can not be ignored, which leads to very detrimental effects on the achievable system performance, especially for single-carrier SM (SC-SM) transmission schemes. To the best of the author's knowledge, none of the previous researchers have been able to provide a thorough analysis on the achievable spectral efficiency (SE) of the massive SC-SM MIMO uplink transmission. In this context, the uplink SE of single-cell massive SC-SM MIMO system is analyzed, and a tight closed-form lower bound is proposed to quantify the SE when the base station (BS) uses maximum ratio (MR) combining for multi-user detection. The impacts of imperfect channel estimation and transmit correlation are all considered. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to verify the tightness of our proposed SE lower bound. Both the theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the SE of uplink single-cell massive SC-SM MIMO system has the potential to outperform the uplink SE achieved by single-antenna UEs.