The Impact of Antenna Switching Time on Spatial Modulation

摘要

Spatial modulation (SM) is an emerging technology that reduces hardware complexity, power consumption, interchannel interference, and antenna synchronization problems of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications. However, SM depends on continuous antenna transitions that rely on RF antenna switches, which consume considerable time. Because of this, the data rates of SM schemes face a cap and are bound to certain limitations and the effective SM transmission is much less than the nominal value. In this letter, we study the impact of switching time on SM and develop expressions for the effective transmission rate, effective capacity, and spectral efficiency. An upper bound on the switching time is derived such that SM sustains capacity superiority in comparison with SIMO systems.