Quadrature spatial modulation (QSM) utilizes the in‐phase and quadrature spatial dimensions to transmit the real and imaginary parts of a single signal symbol, respectively. The improved QSM (IQSM) transmits two signal symbols per channel use through a combination of two antennas for each of the real and imaginary parts. The main contributions of this study can be summarized as follows. First, we derive an upper bound for the error performance of the IQSM. We then design constellation sets that minimize the error performance of the IQSM for several system configurations. Second, we propose a double QSM (DQSM) that transmits the real and imaginary parts of two signal symbols through any available transmit antennas. Finally, we propose a parallel IQSM (PIQSM) that splits the antenna set into equal subsets and performs IQSM within each subset using the same two signal symbols. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed constellations significantly outperform conventional constellations. Additionally, DQSM and PIQSM provide a performance similar to that of IQSM while requiring a smaller number of transmit antennas and outperform IQSM with the same number of transmit antennas.

In spatial modulation (SM), a single signal symbol is transmitted from a given physical antenna, where both the signal symbol and the antenna index carry information. SM with multiple active antennas (MA-SM) transmits several signal symbols from a combination of antennas at each channel use, thereby increasing the spectral efficiency. MA-SM is proposed in combination with a new 3-dimensional constellation, where signal symbols transmitted from a given antenna combination are rotated before transmission. In this paper, we derived an upper-bound on the error probability of the MA-SM as a function of the rotation angles. The search for the optimal rotation angles is modeled as a multi-objective optimization problem. We concluded based on both analytical and simulation results that the 3-dimensional constellation with the optimal angles achieved negligible improvement. Therefore, we do not recommend using the 3-dimensional constellation with the MA-SM system.

In this paper, we propose a new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scheme, called parallel complex quadrature spatial modulation (PCQSM). The proposed technique is based on the complex quadrature spatial modulation (CQSM) to further increase the spectral efficiency of the communication system. CQSM transmits two different complex symbols at each channel use. In contrast with CQSM, the new transmission scheme splits the transmit antennas into groups, and modulates the two signal symbols using the conventional CQSM before transmission. Based on the selected modulation order and the number of possible groups that can be realized, the incoming bits modulate the two signal symbols and the indices of the transmit antennas in each group. We demonstrated that while the complexity and performance of the proposed scheme is the same as that of CQSM, the number of required transmit antennas is significantly reduced. The proposed PCQSM achieves such a benefit without requiring any additional radio frequency (RF) chains. The results obtained from Monte Carlo simulation showed that at a Bit Error Rate (BER) of 10−4, the performance of the PCQSM with two antenna groups closely matches that of CQSM, and outperformed quadrature spatial modulation (QSM) and parallel quadrature spatial modulation (PQSM) by over 0.7 dB. As the number of antenna groups increased to 4, the BER performance of PCQSM with reduced number of transmit antenna and modulation order matches that of QSM. The BER of the proposed scheme using maximum likelihood (ML) receiver is also analyzed theoretically and compared with the BER obtained via simulations.