Hybrid Transmitter Hardware Models for Reliable Implementations of Space Modulation Techniques

Abstract

Space modulation techniques (SMTs) are multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmitter system implementations that have shown to achieve favorable properties compared to existing MIMO technologies. This includes properties such as lower power consumption, cost, and enhanced error performance. As modern wireless standards have come to demand also more reliability and less latency, in recent work analyzing the reliability of SMTs, it was shown that existing SMT implementations do not effectively perform under degraded system conditions. Essentially, under certain failure conditions, parts of SMT systems become unusable although still effectively operational. As a result, affecting the best achievable spectral efficiency, and thus system data rate of the system. In this work, novel SMT implementations are presented and referred to as hybrid SMTs (HSMTs). HSMTs are designed to degrade in a manner that keeps use of operational hardware and maintains a higher spectral efficiency for longer duration. Four different HSMTs are presented namely; hybrid space shift keying (HSSK), hybrid spatial modulation (HSM), hybrid quadrature space shift keying (HQSSK), and hybrid quadrature spatial modulation (HQSM). Additionally, a reliability analysis framework for HSMTs is presented using two different analytical tools and all introduced models are comparatively studied.