Large-System Mutual Information Analysis of Receive Spatial Modulation in Correlated Multi-Cell Massive MIMO Networks

Abstract

In this paper, the receive spatial modulation (RSM) scheme is studied in the downlink of the multi-cell multi-user systems, assuming that the base station (BS) is equipped with a large number of antennas and serves a large number of multi-antenna users, while the user-antenna ratio is bounded. The system model is practical and applicable in a comprehensive manner, accounting for channel estimation, spatially correlated channels, pilot contamination, and path loss. Combining the concepts of RSM and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), the spectral efficiency of linear preprocessing zero-forcing (ZF) and regularized ZF (RZF) methods is studied by approximating the probability of antenna detection and deriving a lower bound for the spatial-domain mutual information. With the aid of the large-system analysis, the deterministic equivalent expressions are provided for the achievable rates that are asymptotically exact. The Monte Carlo simulations validate this claim and show that for limited dimensions, the proposed deterministic equivalents yield accurate approximations, even for strongly correlated channels. The results further show that in comparison with the conventional massive MIMO systems with single-antenna users, equipping each user with multiple antennas and applying the RSM scheme enhances the spectral efficiency when each cell is not heavily loaded.