Spatial multiplexing on high dimensional sphere packing lattices

We investigate the performance of a novel modulation and detection scheme for spatial multiplexing in MIMO systems. For a MIMO point-to-point link, we propose modulation using symbols obtained from a high dimensional lattices for joint multi-antenna transmission. We derive bounds on the error probability performance of sphere packing (SP) lattice based modulation for MIMO fading channels. Numerical results with an ML receiver indicate an improvement in error performance by more than 15 dB for 8 × 8 MIMO systems in comparison to conventional modulation schemes. The bounds on the performance of SP lattices that we derive substantiate this large gain in using SP lattices for modulation in MIMO systems.