Generalized Space-Code Index Modulation for High Rate and Energy-Efficient MIMO Transmission

In this paper, we propose a novel generalized space-code index modulation (GSCIM) scheme for spectrum-efficient and energy-saving transmission. In our proposed scheme, the input information bits are transmitted not only by modulated symbols, but also by the activated transmit antennas pattern and the selected spreading code patterns for the in-phase and quadrature components. Due to the increase of the index dimension, more information bits can be implicitly transmitted, which can improve energy efficiency and have a higher data rate compared with spatial modulation (SM), generalized SM (GSM), generalized CIM-aided SM (GCIM-SM) and CIM-aided quadrature spatial modulation (CIM-QSM). In order to further reduce the complexity of despreading-based maximum likelihood (ML) detection, we propose an enhanced low-complexity detector that can achieve near-ML error performance. An analytical upper bound on the average bit error probability associated with the optimal ML detection is derived, which is verified by simulation results. Simulation results also show that the proposed GSCIM scheme outperforms SM, GSM, GCIM-SM and CIM-QSM schemes in terms of error performance.