Spatial modulation based on reconfigurable antennas: performance evaluation by using the prototype of a reconfigurable antenna

Dung Nguyen Viet,Marco Di Renzo,Beatriz Bedia Exposito,Jose Basterrechea,Vedaprabhu Basavarajappa,Dinh-Thuy Phan-Huy

doi:10.1186/s13638-019-1427-z

Abstract

In this paper, we study the performance of spatial modulation based on reconfigurable antennas. Two main contributions are provided. We introduce an analytical framework to compute the error probability, which is shown to be accurate and useful for system optimization. We design and implement the prototype of a reconfigurable antenna that is specifically designed for application to spatial modulation and that provides multiple radiation patterns that are used to encode the information bits. By using the measured antenna radiation patterns, we show that spatial modulation based on reconfigurable antennas works in practice and that its performance can be optimized by appropriately selecting the radiation patterns to use for a given data rate.

Highlights

Spatial modulation (SM) [1] is a promising lowcomplexity [2] and energy-efficient [3] multiple-antenna modulation scheme, which is considered to be especially suitable for application to the Internet of Things (IoT) [4]
With the aid of our proposed analytical framework, in particular, we show that the error probability can be improved by appropriately choosing the best radiation patterns (RPs), among those available, that minimize the average bit error probability
6 Numerical results and discussion we provide some numerical results in order to validate the analytical derivation of the bit error probability and in order to asses the achievable performance by using the RPs that are obtained from the fabricated antenna prototype

Summary

Introduction

Spatial modulation (SM) [1] is a promising lowcomplexity [2] and energy-efficient [3] multiple-antenna modulation scheme, which is considered to be especially suitable for application to the Internet of Things (IoT) [4]. In RectAnt-SM, by contrast, the information bits are encoded onto the radiation patterns (RPs) of a single-RF and reconfigurable antenna This implementation has several advantages, especially for IoT applications [4]. In order to substantiate the practical implementation and performance of RectAnt-SM, we design a single-RF and reconfigurable antenna that provides us with eight different RPs for encoding the information bits at a lowcomplexity and high energy efficiency. As far as the transmitter is concerned, we consider a reconfigurable antenna with P different RPs. The RPs are denoted as follows: Gp (θ , φ) = Gp (θ , φ) exp j p (θ , φ). The APEP in the high-SNR regime can be formulated as follows: 4.3 Setup with generic Nr we generalize the previous analytical frameworks for Nr = 1 and Nr = 2, by considering a generic value of Nr

Antenna prototype with reconfigurable radiation patterns

Conclusion