Double Quadrature Spatial Modulation

Quadrature spatial modulation (QSM) utilizes the in-phase and quadrature spatial dimensions to transmit the real and imaginary parts, respectively, of a single signal symbol. Improved QSM (IQSM) builds upon QSM to increase the spectral efficiency by transmitting the real and imaginary parts of two signal symbols using antenna combinations of size of two. In this paper, we propose a double QSM (DQSM) scheme that transmits the real and imaginary parts of two signal symbols independently through any of the transmit antennas. The two signal symbols are drawn from two different constellations of the same size with the first symbol drawn from any of the conventional modulation sets while the second is drawn from an optimally rotated version of the first constellation. The optimum rotation angle is obtained through extensive Monte Carlo simulations to minimize the bit error rate (BER) of the system. Simulation results show that for a given spectral efficiency, DQSM performsrelatively close to IQSM while requiring a smaller number of transmit antennas, and outperformsIQSM by up to 2 dB when the same number of antennas are used.