Performance of spatial modulation with constant transmitted power under LOS and NLOS scenarios

Previous work shows that Average Bit Error Probability (ABEP) of SM systems under Non Line of Sight (NLOS) scenario is lower than that under Line of Sight (LOS) scenario because of a lower spatial correlation with a given Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). However, when transmit power is constrained as a constant, the SNR under LOS scenario is larger than that under NLOS scenario benefiting from the strong LOS ray. Spatial correlation and SNR are two contradictory factors which both impact the performance of SM systems. In order to analyze performances of SM systems with a constant power under LOS and NLOS indoor scenarios, 15150 complex MIMO channel matrices are measured in a typical building of Shenzhen Graduate School, Harbin Institute of Technology. Based on measured data and motivated by the Minimum Distance Lower Bound (MDLB) approach, Euclid distances between received symbols of SM systems, as a monotonic function of ABEP, is analyzed. It is found that the effect of the SNR is much more important than the spatial correlation in the indoor environment so that SM system under LOS scenario shows a better performance than NLOS when the transmitting power is a constant. Furthermore, it is observed that bottlenecks of ABEP under LOS and NLOS scenarios are different. Under the LOS scenario, the bottleneck of ABEP is the antenna index error. On the contrary, under the NLOS scenario, the bottleneck of ABEP is the joint error. Using two extreme cases, such phenomena is analytically explained in the paper.