Multiuser SM-MIMO versus Massive MIMO: Uplink Performance Comparison

In this paper, we propose algorithms for signal detection in large-scale multiuser spatial modulation multipleinput multiple-output (SM-MIMO) systems. In large-scale SMMIMO, each user is equipped with multiple transmit antennas (e.g., 2 or 4 antennas) but only one transmit RF chain, and the base station (BS) is equipped with tens to hundreds of (e.g., 128) receive antennas. In SM-MIMO, in a given channel use, each user activates any one of its multiple transmit antennas and the index of the activated antenna conveys information bits in addition to the information bits conveyed through conventional modulation symbols (e.g., QAM). We propose two different algorithms for detection of large-scale SM-MIMO signals at the BS; one is based on message passing and the other is based on local search. The proposed algorithms are shown to achieve very good performance and scale well. Also, for the same spectral efficiency, multiuser SM-MIMO outperforms conventional multiuser MIMO (recently being referred to as massive MIMO) by several dBs; for e.g., with 16 users, 128 antennas at the BS and 4 bpcu per user, SM-MIMO with 4 transmit antennas per user and 4-QAM outperforms massive MIMO with 1 transmit antenna per user and 16-QAM by about 4 to 5 dB at 10 uncoded BER. The SNR advantage of SMMIMO over massive MIMO can be attributed to the following reasons: (i) because of the spatial index bits, SM-MIMO can use a lower-order QAM alphabet compared to that in massive MIMO to achieve the same spectral efficiency, and (ii) for the same spectral efficiency and QAM size, massive MIMO will need more spatial streams per user which leads to increased spatial interference.