On Generalized Spatial Modulation Aided Millimeter Wave MIMO: Spectral Efficiency Analysis and Hybrid Precoder Design

Abstract

The concept of generalized spatial modulation (GenSM) aided millimeter wave (mm-wave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has recently attracted substantial research interest, as it benefits from the large bandwidth of mm-wave MIMO, while maintaining a reduced number of radio frequency (RF) chains. However, due to the lack of precoding design, the preceding GenSM-aided mm-wave MIMO schemes suffered from severe performance loss. Inspired by the reduced-RF-chain structure making implementation cost low while maintaining the benefit of GenSM, in this paper, we incorporate the technique of hybrid precoding into GenSM-aided mm-wave MIMO, where a hybrid digital and analog precoding regime is proposed to enhance the system’s achievable rate. Moreover, a closed-form expression is proposed to provide an accurate approximation to the spectral efficiency (SE) achieved by the proposed scheme. The proposed expression is further simplified in the region of high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). By exploiting the proposed SE expressions as low-complexity cost functions, two algorithms, i.e. the gradient ascent algorithm and the high-SNR approximation algorithm, are exploited to optimize the hybrid precoders in terms of SE maximization. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to substantiate the superior SE performance achieved by the proposed scheme over other GenSM-aided mm-wave MIMO schemes as well as the state-of-the-art mm-wave MIMO systems.