2012 IEEE 23rd International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications - (PIMRC)
Bit-Interleaved Coded Spatial Modulation
Mutlu Koca
Electrical & Electronics Engineering Dept.
Boǧaziçi University
Bebek 34342 Istanbul, Turkey
Email: mutlu.koca@boun.edu.tr
Abstract—We address coded spatial modulation (CSM) and
present a novel approach denoted as bit-interleaved coded spatial
modulation (BICSM) with iterative demodulation/decoding. The
proposed transceiver architecture alleviates some drawbacks of
the previously proposed CSM systems, such as being limited to a
particular class of trellis codes or being effective only in limited
channel scenarios. We specifically address the performance of
BICSM over correlated Rayleigh and Rician fading channels and
provide a general framework for the error performance analysis.
Simulation results illustrate that BICSM provides not only
significant performance improvements against channel fading in
comparison to other CSM approaches but also higher robustness
against antenna correlation effects.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Spatial modulation (SM), proposed in [1], is an emerging
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication tech-
nology where the information is conveyed not only over the
signal space but also over the antenna space. In conventional
SM, at each transmission instant, part of the incoming infor-
mation bits is mapped onto a transmit antenna index while
the rest is used to select a constellation symbol within the
modulation alphabet. Then only one antenna -designated by
the antenna bits- is activated to send the selected symbol. This
approach has a number of advantages such as the avoidance
of inter-channel interference (ICI), reduction in transmitter
and receiver complexity and improvement in the error per-
formance, especially at large spectral efficiencies. However,
the transmission and reception of two different forms of
information simultaneously, creates challenges in its analysis
and design. One such challenge is the design of coded spatial
modulation (CSM) schemes.
CSM is first addressed in [2] where the authors observe
that channel conditions such as the presence of a direct line-
of-sight (LOS) component, i.e., Rician fading, and/or heavy
transmit correlation have a more detrimental effect on the
antenna bits than the modulation bits. As a solution, a trellis
coded spatial modulation (TCSM) approach is proposed. Here,
contrary to the uncoded SM transmitter using 𝑛 bits to map
𝑁𝑡 = 2𝑛 transmit antennas, the TCSM transmitter takes
𝑛 − 1 input bits and forms 𝑛 antenna bits via a rate 𝑛−1 𝑛 performing worse than uncoded SM in uncorrelated or mod-
trellis code. This operation provides error protection for the
antenna bits while leaving the symbol bits uncoded. Moreover,
This work is supported by TÜBİTAK (Scientific and Technical Research
Council of Turkey) under Contract 111E274, and the Boǧaziçi University
Research Fund under Contract 6538.
978-1-4673-2569-1/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE
Hikmet Sari
SUPELEC
Plateau du Moulon - 3 rue Joliot-Curie
91192 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
E-mail:hikmet.sari@supelec.fr.
under a fixed spectral efficiency constraint, TCSM increases
the number of bits allocated for modulation symbols by one,
resulting in the doubling the size of the modulation alphabet.
Therefore two counteracting phenomena take place in TCSM
as follows: the performance is improved by coding on the
antenna bits and degraded by the increase in the constella-
tion size (and the decrease in the minimum distance). As a
consequence, even in cases where the antenna bits are more
susceptible to channel effects than the symbol bits, the benefits
of coding on the antenna bits are reduced by the loss caused by
detecting symbols with smaller minimum separation, causing
the gains provided by TCSM to be small. In cases where
antenna and symbol bits are affected by the channel more
or less equally, TCSM performs even worse than uncoded SM
because the loss due to doubling the uncoded symbol alphabet
surpassed the coding gain of the antenna bits. That is why,
another CSM scheme called SM with trellis coding (SM-TC)
is proposed in [3] where all incoming bits are encoded and the
coded bits are then mapped onto antenna and symbol indices.
Notice that employing error protection for both the antenna
and symbol bits is shown to provide significant performance
gains over TCSM. One disadvantage of SM-TC however is
that, by construction, the number of trellis states needs to be
doubled with each increment in the spectral efficiency. That is
to say, for instance, for 3 b/s/Hz transmission SM-TC can be
implemented with 8, 16, 32, . . . ,etc. state trellises, however the
minimum number of states at 4b/s/Hz is 16, making SM-TC
potentially infeasible for high data rate applications.
In this paper, we extend the bit-interleaved coded mod-
ulation (BICM) principle of [4] to SM and present a bit-
interleaved coded spatial modulation (BICSM) approach as an
effective method not only for error protection against channel
fading and noise but also for robustness against the LOS and
spatial correlation effects. Simple but effective convolutional
codes with puncturing are employed to implement BICSM
systems with equal and possibly unequal error protection
capabilities. Similar to SM-TC, error protection is distributed
to both antenna and symbol bits. It is shown that unlike TCSM
erately correlated channels, BICSM universally outperforms
the uncoded SM systems (and thus the TCSM schemes) in
practical bit-error rate (BER) levels, and provide substantial
performance gains in all channel conditions. Notice that unlike
[2], [3] utilizing soft-output demodulation and decoding blocks
1949
but never taking full advantage of iterative processing, we
present additional performance improvements achieved by
iterative demodulation/decoding operations. We also present
an upper bounding technique for BICSM that is applicable to
an arbitrary number of transmit/receive antennas and general
modulation alphabets for uncorrelated/correlated Rayleigh and
Rician fading channels. The advantages of BICSM can be
summarized as following:
∙ Like SM-TC, BICSM employs error correction for both
the antenna and symbol bits. That is why, BICSM uni-
versally outperforms the uncoded SM systems (and thus
the TCSM) in practical bit error rate levels and provides
substantial performance gains in all channel conditions.
∙ BICSM, implemented with the same design parameters
(same encoder, number of antennas, spectral efficiencies)
also provides a performance improvement over SM-TC
in both correlated and uncorrelated channel conditions.
∙ Unlike SM-TC which doubles the trellis code complexity
with every increment in the spectral efficiency, BICSM
can be implemented with even the 2 state codes at any
spectral efficiency. It also has the design flexibility of
utilizing powerful block and convolutional codes.
∙ As a side benefit, while TCSM is a severely unequal error
protection scheme and SM-TC is always an equal error
protection method, BICSM can easily be tailored to serve
for both equal and unequal error protection purposes.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section
II, the signal and generalized fading channel models are pre-
sented. The error performance analysis is provided in section
III. Simulation results validating the theoretical derivations are
presented in Section IV and the paper is ended with conclusive
remarks and discussions in Section V.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
We consider the BICSM transceiver scheme in Fig. 1
where the elements of a bit sequence u (𝑢𝑖 ∈ {0, 1}, for
𝑖 = 1, . . . , 𝐿𝑢 ) is processed by a channel encoder to form
the coded bit sequence v with elements 𝑣𝑗 ∈ {0, 1} for
𝑗 = 1, . . . , 𝐿𝑣 . Notice that block or convolutional codes codes
can be employed in this scheme, however because of their
use in previous works [2], [3] we also consider convolutional
codes as building block of BICSM. The code sequence is
bitwise interleaved to form the sequence with elements 𝑐𝑗
for 𝑗 = 1, . . . , 𝐿𝑐 that is partitioned for mapped onto the
spatial modulator. We consider the conventional SM system
model with 𝑁𝑡 transmit and 𝑁𝑟 receive antennas employing
optimal detection in [5]. We also assume that the number of
transmit antennas is an integer power of 2, i.e., 𝑁𝑡 = 2𝑛 ,
and the transmitter employs 𝑀 -ary digital modulation to an
𝑚
𝑚-bit message { where 𝑀 = 2 and the modulation} symbol
set is 퓧 = 𝑋1 , . . . 𝑋𝑘 , . . . 𝑋𝑀 . Notice that the
spectral efficiency of the system is 𝑅 = 𝑛 + 𝑚 = log2 (𝑁𝑡 𝑀 ).
At each transmission instant, each set of 𝑛 + 𝑚 of bits is
split into groups of 𝑛 and 𝑚 bits, and the former is used to
select one of the 𝑁𝑡 antennas and the latter to be mapped onto
one of 𝑀 possible complex constellation points determined
1950
by the particular digital
[ modulation method. The]𝑇transmitted
signal vector is x = 𝑥1 , . . . 𝑥ℓ , . . . 𝑥𝑁𝑡 where all
but one entry is zero because only one antenna is active for
transmission. Notice that if the ℓ-th antenna is selected, then
all entries other than 𝑥ℓ is zero and 𝑥ℓ ∈ 퓧 . In other words,
the position of the non-zero element denotes the antenna index
and its value indicates the transmitted symbol. Similar
[ to ][5],
we assume a power constraint of unity, i.e., 𝐸x x† x = 1 .
A slow fading MIMO channel with the sum of an average
(or fixed, possibly line-of-sight - LOS ) component and a
variable (or random) component is considered. Accordingly,
𝑁𝑟 × 𝑁𝑡 dimensional channel matrix H is described as
√ √
𝐾 1
H= H̄ + H̃ (1)
𝐾 +1 𝐾 +1
where H̄ and H̃ are the fixed and variable components, respec-
tively. The square-root terms are the normalization weights
with 𝐾 being the Rician factor. The fixed part H̄ is such
that [H̄]𝑝,𝑞 = ℎ̄𝑝,𝑞 , for 𝑝 = 1, . . . , 𝑁𝑟 and 𝑞 = 1, . . . , 𝑁𝑡 .
The variable component of the channel matrix, H̃, consists
of -possibly correlated- complex Gaussian variables. The cor-
related channel matrix can be described by the well-known
Kronecker correlation model in which H̃ is expressed as
1 1
𝑇
H̃ = Σ𝑟2 H̆Σ𝑡2 (2)
where 𝜮𝑡 and 𝜮𝑟 are the real valued and Hermitian symmetric
transmit and receive correlation matrices, respectively, with
𝑡
the elements defined as [𝜮𝑡 ]𝑞,ˆ𝑞 = 𝜎𝑞,ˆ 𝑞 for 𝑞, 𝑞
ˆ = 1, . . . , 𝑁𝑡
𝑟
and [𝜮𝑟 ]𝑝,𝑝ˆ = 𝜎𝑝,𝑝ˆ for 𝑝, 𝑝ˆ = 1, . . . , 𝑁𝑟 . H̆ is the indepen-
dent Rayleigh fading channel matrix whose elements of H̆
are described as independent identically distributed complex
Gaussian random variables, i.e., [H̆]𝑝,𝑞 = ℎ̆𝑝,𝑞 ∼ 𝒞𝒩 (0, 1) for
𝑝 = 1, . . . , 𝑁𝑟 and 𝑞 = 1, . . . , 𝑁𝑡 . The correlation matrices
can be formed according to a number of models as detailed
in the discussion of the simulation parameters and results.
Combining (1) and (2), the general channel model can be
expressed as
√ √
𝐾 1 1 1
𝑇
H= H̄ + Σ𝑟2 H̆Σ𝑡2 (3)
𝐾 +1 𝐾 +1
which, via proper parameter selection, enables modeling the
uncorrelated/correlated Rayleigh and Rician fading scenarios.
The received signal model is expressed as
√
y= 𝜌Hx + 𝝂 (4)
where 𝜌 = 𝐸𝑠 /𝑁0 is the average signal to noise ratio (SNR)
observed at each receiver branch, y and 𝝂 are the 𝑁𝑟 × 1
received signal and channel noise vectors, respectively, and H
is the 𝑁𝑟 × 𝑁𝑡 dimensional channel matrix described above.
The elements of 𝝂 are modeled as independent identically
distributed (i.i.d.) complex Gaussian variables with zero mean
and unit variance, i.e., 𝜈𝑘 ∼ 𝒞𝒩 (0, 1) for 𝑘 = 1, . . . , 𝑁𝑟 .
 Tx1 Rx1
ca Antenna xa
Index 𝐿𝑒 (ca )
Mapper
..
. Tx𝑖 Rx𝑖 ...
u Channel v c SISO 𝐿𝑒 (c) 𝐿𝑎 (v) 𝐿𝑝 (u)
Encoder
𝜋 S/P
Spatial
Mod. .. .
Spatial P/S 𝜋 -1 SISO
Rx𝑁𝑟. Demod. 𝐿𝑒 (cs ) Channel
cs Symbol xs . Tx𝑁𝑡 . 𝐿𝑒 (v)
Index Decoder
Mapper MIMO Channel
+ 𝐿𝑎 (u) = 0
AWGN
𝐿𝑎 (ca )
𝐿𝑎 (c)
𝐿𝑎 (cs )
S/P 𝜋

Figure 1: Block diagrams of BICSM transceiver system.

Notice that the optimum antenna and symbol index pair where 𝐿𝑝 (𝑐𝑎,𝑖 ) and 𝐿𝑝 (𝑐𝑠,𝑖 ) are the a posteriori antenna bit
(𝑢ML , 𝑣ML ) in the maximum likelihood (ML) sense is ex- and symbol bit LLRs, respectively, and 𝑃 (⋅) denotes the a
pressed as priori bit probabilities. The extrinsic LLRs to be used in the
(𝑢ML , 𝑣ML ) = arg max 𝑓Y (y ∣ x, H) = arg min 𝐷(y, h𝑢 𝑋𝑣 ) iterative processing can be obtained by subtracting a priori
𝑢,𝑣 𝑢,𝑣 LLRs from the respective a posteriori LLRs.
where h𝑢 is the 𝑢-th column of H for 𝑢 = 1, . . . , 𝑁𝑡 and Notice that both the demodulator and the back-end channel
𝑋𝑣 is the 𝑣-th element of the modulation alphabet 퓧 for decoder are both implemented by SISO blocks. The LLRs
𝑣 = 1, . . . , 𝑀 . 𝐷(y, h𝑢 𝑋𝑣 ) is the -modified- distance metric from the demodulator is processed by the SISO channel
between y and h𝑢 𝑋𝑣 defined as decoder to form extrinsic LLRs on both the information bits
√ and the code bits. If the receiver employs iterative demodula-
𝐷(y, h𝑢 𝑋𝑣 ) = 𝜌 ∥ h𝑢 𝑋𝑣 ∥2 −2Re{y† h𝑢 𝑋𝑣 }. (5) tion/decoding iterations, the code LLRs are sent back to the
The receiver can use these hard decisions and de-map SM demodulator to start the next iteration.
the symbols back to the bits using the mapping alphabet.
III. B IT E RROR P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS
Then the antenna and symbol bit decision sequences (ĉ𝑎 , ĉ𝑠 )
is multiplexed back to to the decision sequences. This bit The exact performance analysis of the SISO demodula-
sequence can be decoded by a hard decision Viterbi decoder. tion/decoding system with iterative processing is fairly com-
Alternatively, as pointed out in [2], [3], the receiver can be plex and analytically difficult to tract. Most methods use some
implemented with a soft-input soft-output (SISO) SM demodu- form of approximate statistical modeling of the LLRs in (6)
lator followed by a SISO channel decoder. The operation of the and (7) such as the saddle point approximation (SP) of [6])
SISO demodulator is as follows. Suppose 𝒰𝑖,1 and 𝒰𝑖,0 denote for the non-iterative case and the error-free feedback approx-
the antenna index subsets where each element is mapped by 𝑛- imation [7], [8] for the iterative processing case. Because
bit codewords whose 𝑖-th bit is 1 and 0, respectively. Similarly, our objective is to present a fundamental understanding of
𝒱𝑖,1 and 𝒱𝑖,0 denote the symbol index subsets where each BICSM in this work, we limit our treatment with a general
element is mapped by 𝑛-bit codewords whose 𝑖-th bit is 1 ML decoding upper bounding method as described below.
and 0, respectively. Then the log-likelihoods ratios (LLRs) are Assuming infinite interleaving, we can describe the compos-
written as ite channel between the encoder and decoder as a memoryless
𝑝(𝑐𝑎,𝑖 = 1 ∣ y) binary symmetric channel (BSC) with an error probability
𝐿𝑝 (𝑐𝑎,𝑖 ) = log (6) (BEP) of 𝑃𝑏 . Then average bit error analysis of the system
𝑝(𝑐𝑎,𝑖 = 0 ∣ y)
∑ ∑ ∏𝑛 becomes that of the channel decoder over BSC channels.
𝒱 𝒰𝑖,1 𝑝(y ∣ h𝑢 𝑥𝑣 ) 𝑗=1 𝑃 (𝑐𝑎,𝑗 ) Notice that in our case 𝑃𝑏 is the average BEP (ABEP) of
= log ∑ ∑ ∏𝑛
𝒱 𝒰𝑖,0 𝑝(y ∣ h𝑢 𝑥𝑣 ) 𝑗=1 𝑃 (𝑐𝑎,𝑗 ) the uncoded SM system, 𝑃¯𝑏𝑢𝑐 . Specifically, the ABEP of the
∑ ∑ ∑
−𝜌∣y−h𝑢 𝑥𝑣 ∣2 + 𝑛𝑗=1 log 𝑃 (𝑐𝑎,𝑗 )
coded system under ML decoding 𝑃¯𝑏𝑐 is upper bounded by
𝒱 𝒰𝑖,1 𝑒
= log ∑ ∑ ∑
−𝜌∣y−h𝑢 𝑥𝑣 ∣2 + 𝑛 ∂𝑇 (𝑊, 𝐼)
𝒰𝑖,0 𝑒
𝑗=1 log 𝑃 (𝑐𝑎,𝑗 ) ¯ 𝑐
𝑃𝑏 ≤ (8)
𝒱
∂𝐼 √
𝐼=1,𝑊 = 4𝑃¯𝑏𝑢𝑐 (1−𝑃¯𝑏𝑢𝑐 )
𝑝(𝑐𝑠,𝑖 = 1 ∣ y)
𝐿𝑝 (𝑐𝑠,𝑖 ) = log (7)
𝑝(𝑐𝑠,𝑖 = 0 ∣ y) where T(W,I) is the generating function of the convolutional
∑ ∑ ∑
−𝜌∣y−h𝑢 𝑥𝑣 ∣2 + 𝑚 encoder [9]. Notice that in [2], this ABEP bound is provided
𝑗=1 log 𝑃 (𝑐𝑠,𝑗 )
𝒰 𝒱𝑖,1 𝑒 only for 𝑁𝑡 × 1 SM systems, because the uncoded ABEP for
= log ∑ ∑ ∑
−𝜌∣y−h𝑢 𝑥𝑣 ∣2 + 𝑚𝑗=1 log 𝑃 (𝑐𝑠,𝑗 )
𝒰 𝒱𝑖,0 𝑒 general SM systems could not be derived in closed form. On

1951
the other hand as presented in [10] the ABEP for SM can be In the case of Rayleigh fading further simplification is
derived in closed form for correlated Rayleigh channels and possible. Notice that when the LOS component of the channel
for Rician channels via simple numerical integration. This in is absent, i.e., when 𝐾 = 0, mz = 0 and 𝜮z becomes
turn makes it possible to compute (8). 𝜌[ ]
𝜮z = ∣ 𝑋𝑣 ∣2 + ∣ 𝑋𝑣ˆ ∣2 −2Re{𝜎𝑢,ˆ
𝑡 ∗
𝑣 𝑋𝑣 𝑋𝑣
ˆ } 𝜮𝑟 .
Notice that the uncoded SM ABEP with optimum ML de- 2
tection can be computed using the well-known upper bounding As a result the the conditional APEP in (13) reduces to
technique in [9] such that:
∫ 𝜋2 [ ( ˜ )]−1
Rayleigh 1 𝜮
𝑃¯𝑠
𝑁𝑡 ∑ 𝑁𝑡 ∑ 𝑀 ∑ 𝑀 z
1 ∑ 𝑁 (𝑢, 𝑢 ˆ, 𝑣, 𝑣ˆ) ¯ (𝑢, 𝑢ˆ, 𝑣, 𝑣ˆ) = det +I 𝑑𝜃.
𝑃¯𝑏𝑢𝑐 ≤ 𝑃𝑠 (𝑢, 𝑢
ˆ, 𝑣, 𝑣ˆ). 𝜋 0 sin2 𝜃
𝑁𝑡 𝑀 − 1 𝑢=1 log 2 (𝑁 𝑡𝑀 )
ˆ=1 𝑣=1 𝑣
𝑢 ˆ=1
(9) Suppose 𝜆𝑘 for 𝑘 = 1, . . . , 𝑁𝑟 denote the eigenvalues of the
where, 𝑁 (𝑢, 𝑢ˆ, 𝑣, 𝑣ˆ) is the number of bits in error between the matrix 𝜮˜ z . In the fully correlated Rayleigh fading case (mz =
[ ]
respective channel and symbol pairs, (h𝑢 , 𝑋𝑣 ) and (h𝑢ˆ , 𝑋𝑣ˆ ). 0, rank 𝜮 ˜ z = 𝑁𝑟 ), all the eigenvalues of 𝜮 ˜ z are distinct.
The term log2 (𝑁𝑡 𝑀 ) in expression in (9) represents the total ∏ ( )−1
𝜆
number of antenna and symbol bits and division with this term Then where 𝜉𝑘 = 𝑗∕=𝑘 1 − 𝜆𝑘𝑗 is the 𝑘-th residual in
indicates the summation weight for the corresponding pairwise the partial fraction expression (PFE) for 𝑘 = 1, . . . , 𝑁𝑟 . Then
error probability (PEP). 𝑃¯𝑠 (𝑢, 𝑢 ˆ, 𝑣, 𝑣) is the average pairwise as shown in [10] 𝑃¯𝑠 (𝑢, 𝑢 ˆ, 𝑣, 𝑣ˆ) can be evaluated as
symbol error probability (APEP) such that 𝑁𝑟
( √ )
Rayleigh ∑ 𝜆
[ (√ )] 𝑃¯𝑠
𝑘
(𝑢, 𝑢
ˆ, 𝑣, 𝑣ˆ) = 𝜉𝑘 1 − (13)
𝑃¯𝑠 (𝑢, 𝑢ˆ, 𝑣, 𝑣ˆ) = 𝐸H 𝑄 ∥ z ∥2 (10) 𝑘=1
1 + 𝜆𝑘

where the 𝑁𝑟 × 1 vector z is defined as which is a direct extension of the relation in ( [12], App. B).
√ If the correlation matrix has repeated
( eigenvalues,
) the PFE
𝜌( ) of 𝜮 ˜ z has terms in the form of 𝜆𝑘2 + 1 −𝑡 where 𝑡 > 1
z= h𝑢 𝑋𝑣 − h𝑢ˆ 𝑋𝑣ˆ . (11) sin 𝜃
2 for which the expansion coefficients can be found and ABEP
Notice that so long as the Kronecker correlation model (2) can still be computed. The extreme case is when the receiver
is valid in the correlated channel model in (3) and given the correlation does not exist, which corresponds to 𝑡 = 𝑁𝑟 . In
definition in (11), both the real and imaginary parts of z are this case, the APEP can be expressed directly as
Gaussian multivariate vectors. As a result the vector z has the Rayleigh
𝑃¯𝑠 (𝑢, 𝑢
ˆ, 𝑣, 𝑣ˆ)
conditional joint PDF given as [ ] 𝑁2𝑟 𝑁∑ √
𝑟 −1 ( )[ ]𝑘
𝜌¯ 𝑁𝑟 − 1 + 𝑘 𝜌¯
† −1
𝑒−(z−mz ) 𝜮z (z−mz ) == 1−
𝑓Z (z ∣ h𝑢 , h𝑢ˆ , 𝑋𝑣 , 𝑋𝑣ˆ ) = (12) 1 + 𝜌¯ 𝑘 1 + 𝜌¯
𝑘=0
𝜋 𝑁𝑟 det(𝜮z )
where the value of 𝜌¯ depends on the values of 𝑋𝑣 and 𝑋𝑣ˆ
where det(⋅) represents the matrix determinant operation and and the presence of transmit correlation such that
mZ and 𝜮Z are expressed as
𝜌( [ 𝑡 ])
√ 𝜌¯ = ∣ 𝑋𝑣 ∣2 + ∣ 𝑋𝑣ˆ ∣2 −2Re 𝜎𝑢,ˆ ∗
𝑢 𝑋𝑣 𝑋𝑣
ˆ . (14)
𝜌𝐾 ( ) 4
mz = E [z] = h̄𝑢 𝑋𝑣 − h̄𝑢ˆ 𝑋𝑣ˆ In summary, given any two pairs of channel and symbol in-
2(𝐾 + 1)
[ ] dices, the APEP, 𝑃¯𝑠 (𝑢, 𝑢
ˆ, 𝑣, 𝑣ˆ), can be conveniently computed
𝜮z = E (z − mz )(z − mz )† in closed form. With this result the computations of (9) and
𝜌 [ ]
= ∣ 𝑋𝑣 ∣2 + ∣ 𝑋𝑣ˆ ∣2 −2Re{𝜎𝑢,ˆ 𝑡 ∗
𝑢 𝑋𝑣 𝑋 𝑣
ˆ } 𝜮𝑟 .
then (8) becomes straightforward.
2(𝐾 + 1)
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
Next using the distribution of z in (12) and employing the
methodology of [11] we can derive the conditional APEP In this section, we present simulated BER performance
expression in (10) as comparisons of BICSM with TCSM [2] and SM-TC [3]
∫ (√ ) schemes over uncorrelated/correlated Rayleigh and Rician fad-
𝑃¯𝑠 (𝑢, 𝑢
ˆ, 𝑣, 𝑣ˆ) = 𝑄 ∥ z ∥2 𝑓Z (z ∣ h𝑢 , h𝑢ˆ , 𝑋𝑣 , 𝑋𝑣ˆ )𝑑z ing channels. All simulations are performed assuming 4 b/s/Hz
( z ) spectral efficiency. The MIMO transceivers are simulated with
∫ 𝜋2 exp −m̃† [𝜮 ˜ z + sin2 𝜃I]−1 m̃z 4 receive antennas and 4 or 8 transmit antennas. The transmit
1 z
= ( ) 𝑑𝜃 and receive channel correlation matrices in the Kronecker
𝜋 0 ˜
det 𝜮2z + I model are formed according to the exponential correlation
sin 𝜃
model of [13]. Here, the correlation matrix entries are formed
where m̃z = m √ z and 𝜮˜ z = 𝜮z . Even though this integral as [𝜮]𝑢,𝑣 = 𝜎𝑢,𝑣 = 𝛾 ∣𝑢−𝑣∣ where 𝛽 is a fixed (real or
2 2
does not simplify any further to yield closed form expressions complex) correlation coefficient between adjacent antennas.
for cases where mz ∕= 0, it can be conveniently evaluated For channel decoding, [2] and [3] employs hard and soft
numerically for any given mean vector and covariance matrix. decision Viterbi decoders, respectively. For consistency of

1952
presentation and to have performance differences occurring
only due to the particular CSM scheme, both BICSM and
the also TCSM and SM-TC are simulated with an optimum
maximum a posteriori probability algorithm in logarithmic
domain [14]. In addition, for reasons explained below we
present our comparisons with TCSM and SM-TC separately.
A. Comparison with TCSM
In [2], TCSM with 4 b/s/Hz is simulated with 4 transmit
and 4 receive antennas. The rate 1/2 and 4 state convolutional
code with generator matrix (5, 7)8 is used to form 2 parallel
bit streams for antenna index mapping from a single input
bit stream. Remaining 3 input bit (streams) are modulated
with 8-QAM constellation. The corresponding uncoded SM
system employs QPSK or 4-QAM modulation. The BICSM
system used in comparison employs the same code, so code
complexities are equal. To better facilitate a performance trade-
off between the demodulator and the decoder, one out of every
four bits is punctured using the matrix
[ ]
1 1
P= .
1 0
Because coded bits are interleaved and demultiplexed effec-
tively both antenna and symbol bits are equally protected with
a rate 2/3 code. In BICSM we map the remaining 4 code bits
to 16-QAM constellation points.
In Fig. 2, the performances of uncoded SM, TCSM and
BICSM are compared for correlated/uncorrelated Rayleigh
channels. In the uncorrelated fading case, TCSM performs
roughly 4 dB worse than uncoded SM. Notice that, coding
gain/detection loss tradeoff comes to an equilibrium only when
the transmit correlation exponent is 0.8 (the receiver correla-
tion only shifts the performance and has no effect on this
trade-off) where TCSM and uncoded SM performances.. On
the other hand, the BICSM performance is 3 and 7 dBs better
than uncoded SM for the uncorrelated and correlated Rayleigh
channels, respectively. Both gains can be improved by about 2
dB’s with a few decoding iterations. So BICSM provides not
only a performance improvement but also robustness against
channel correlation effects. In both of these cases even without
iterative processing BICSM significantly outperforms TCSM.
In Fig. 3, the performances are compared for Rician chan-
nels with 𝐾 = 5. TCSM provides an improvement of 3 dB
over uncoded SM at 10−5 BER level. On the other hand the
improvement provided by BICSM is 7 dB over the uncoded
SM and 4 dB over TCSM. In other words, BICSM outperforms
TCSM even in the channels where it is designed for. Notice
that for these type of channels, BICSM can easily be modi-
fied to have unequal error protection capability that is more
powerful than TCSM. This is accomplished by separating the
antenna and symbol bits first, employing 2 bit puncturing
only on the symbol bits and using separate interleavers for
antenna and symbol bits. In this scheme BICSM with unequal
error protection (BICSM-UEP), the antenna bits are protected
with a rate 1/2 code and the symbol bits are protected by an
equivalent 3/4 code. As seen in the figure, in Rician channels
1953
BICSM-UEP formed with a slight modification of the original
BICSM provides an extra 2 dB improvement.
B. Comparison with SM-TC
SMTC in [3] also uses a rate 4/6 trellis code for 4 b/s/Hz
transmission and is shown to provide significant performance
gains over the TCSM. However the comparisons are not
performed under equal conditions for two reasons: i) For 4
b/s/hz, by construction the SM-TC code is with at least 16
states whereas the TCSM code is implemented with a 4-state
trellis with generator (5, 7)8 . ii) Another resource dimension
is the number of transmit antennas. Instead of employing
4 transmit antennas and 16-QAM modulation, the authors
employ 8 transmit antennas and 8-PSK modulation. Because
SM systems tend to perform better as the number of transmit
antennas are increased and the modulation size is decreased,
the performance improvement is also partially due to this extra
antenna dimension. That is why, we provide two different
comparisons with SM-TC as described below.
First the SM-TC framework is simulated with 4 transmit
antennas (as opposed to 8) to be able to compare its perfor-
mance with the same resources as [2]. For comparison our rate
2/3 code obtained with puncturing of the rate 1/2, generator
(5, 7)8 code is used. Because the SM-TC code has 16 states, a
16 state code with generator (23, 35)8 having roughly the same
decoding complexity is also employed. As seen in Fig. 4, our
4 state code performs the same as the 16 state SM-TC in both
correlated and uncorrelated Rayleigh cases, especially below
a certain BER level (The correlation scenarios, i.e., 𝛾 = 0 and
𝛾 = 0.7, are taken from [3].). BICSM with the same number
of states (16 states), outperforms SM-TC by an amount of
1.5 dB at 10−5 BER level. Because the gains from iterative
processing are already shown they are not included here again.
Second we also simulate the two systems with the same
parameters in [3], i.e., 8 transmit antennas and 8-PSK modu-
lations in both SM-TC and BICSM. Again we employed both
4 and 16 state codes BICSM. Notice that as before our 4
state code performance is the same as that of SM-TC for
uncorrelated Rayleigh fading. However, even our 4 state code
has more robustness against channel correlation effects than
SM-TC. When the a 16 state code is used similar to SM-
TC, our system is superior to SM-TC by 1.5 and 2 dB’s for
uncorrelated and correlated channels, respectively. This also
illustrates the respective robustness of BICSM over SM-TC.
V. C ONCLUSION
We present a novel CSM scheme in which the BICM is
combined with SM as an alternative to the other trellis coded
SM schemes. Proposed BICSM scheme not only outperforms
its counterparts but also forms a feasible CSM structure as it
can implemented with a variety of code families. It also can
be tailored easily to provide equal or unequal error protection
capability depending on the transmission enviroment.
R EFERENCES
[1] R. Mesleh, H. Haas, S. Sinanovic, C.W. Ahn, S. Yun, “Spatial modula-
tion,” IEEE Trans. Veh. Tech., vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 2228–41, July 2008.
 0 0
10
Uncoded SM, QPSK, γ =γ =0
10
t r
SM−TC [3], r=4/6, γt=γr=0
Uncoded SM, QPSK, γt=γr=0.8
TCSM [2], 8−QAM, γt=γr=0 SM−TC [3], r=4/6, γ =γ =0.7
−1
t r
−1
10
TCSM [2], 8−QAM, γt=γr=0.8 10 BICSM r=2/3, g=(5,7) , γ =γ =0
8 t r
BICSM r=2/3, 16−QAM, it.=0, γt=γr=0 BICSM r=2/3, g=(5,7) , γ =γ =0.7
8 t r
BICSM r=2/3, 16−QAM, it.=3, γt=γr=0
−2 −2 BICSM r=2/3, g=(23,35)8, γt=γr=0
10 BICSM r=2/3, 16−QAM, it.=0, γ =γ =0.8 10
t r BICSM r=2/3, g=(23,35)8, γt=γr=0.7
BICSM r=2/3, 16−QAM, it.=3, γt=γr=0.8

Bit Error Rate

−3 −3
10 10
Bit Error Rate

−4 −4
10 10

−5 −5
10 10

−6 −6
10 10

−7 −7
10 10
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18
SNR (dB)
SNR (dB)

Figure 2: Comparison of BICSM with TCSM [2]. 𝑁𝑡 = 4 and Figure 4: Comparison of BICSM with SM-TC [3]. 𝑁𝑡 = 4
𝑁𝑟 = 4. and 𝑁𝑟 = 4. All schemes use 16-QAM.

0
10
0 SM−TC [3], r=4/6, γ =γ =0
t r
10
Uncoded SM, QPSK SM−TC [3], r=4/6, γ =γ =0.7
−1
t r
TCSM [2], 8−QAM 10 BICSM r=2/3, g=(5,7)8, γt=γr=0
BICSM r=2/3, 16−QAM, it.=0
10
−1
BICSM r=2/3, g=(5,7) , γ =γ =0.7
BICSM r=2/3, 16−QAM, it.=3 8 t r
BICSM−UEP r=2/3, 16−QAM, it.=0 −2 BICSM r=2/3, g=(23,35) , γ =γ =0
10 8 t r
BICSM−UEP r=2/3, 16−QAM, it.=3 BICSM r=2/3, g=(23,35)8, γt=γr=0.7
−2
10
Bit Error Rate

−3
10
Bit Error Rate

−3
10
−4
10
−4
10
−5
10
−5
10
−6
10
−6
10
−7
10
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
−7
10 SNR (dB)
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24
SNR (dB)

Figure 3: Comparison of BICSM with TCSM [2]. 𝑁𝑡 = 4 and Figure 5: Comparison of BICSM with SM-TC [3]. 𝑁𝑡 = 8
𝑁𝑟 = 4. Uncorrelated Rician fading with K=5. and 𝑁𝑟 = 4. Alls schemes use 8-PSK.

Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 2051-2054, June 2007.

[2] R. Mesleh, M. Di Renzo, H. Haas and P. Grant, “Trellis coded spatial
modulation,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol.9, no. 7, pp. 2349–
2361, July 2010.
[3] E. Basar, U. Aygolu, E. Panayirci, and H.V. Poor, “New trellis code
design for spatial modulation,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 10,
no.8, pp.2670-2680, August 2011.
[4] G. Caire, G. Taricco, and E. Biglieri, “Bit-interleaved coded modula
tion,” IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol. 44, pp. 927-947, May 1998.
[5] J. Jeganathan, A. Ghrayeb and L. Szczecinski, “Spatial modulation:
optimal detection and performance analysis,” IEEE Commun. Lett., vol.
12, no. 8, pp. 545-547, Aug. 2008.
[6] A. Martinez, A. Guillen i Fabregas, and G. Caire, “Error probability of
bit-interleaved coded modulation,” IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory,vol. 52,
no. 1, pp. 262-271, Jan. 2006.
[7] A. Chindapol, J. A. Ritcey, “Design, analysis and performance evalua-
tion for BICM-ID with square QAM constellations in Rayleigh fading
channels,” IEEE J. Select. Areas Comm., vol. 19, pp. 944-57, May 2001.
[8] A. Martinez, A. Guillen i Fabregas, and G. Caire, “A closed-form
approximation for the error probability of BPSK fading channels,” IEEE
[9] G. Proakis, Digital Communications, 4th ed., McGraw- Hill Higher
Education, Dec. 2000.
[10] M. Koca and H. Sari, “Performance analysis of spatial modulation over
correlated fading channels,” in Proc. IEEE VTC 2012-Fall, Sep. 2012.
[11] V. Veeravalli, “On performance analysis for signalling on correlated
fading channels,” IEEE Trans. Commun., vol.49, no. 11, pp. 1879-1883,
Nov. 2001.
[12] M.-S. Alouini and A. Goldsmith, “A unified approach for calculating er-
ror rates of linearly modulated signals over generalized fading channels,”
IEEE Trans. on Commun., vol. 47, no. 9, pp. 13241334, Sep 1999.
[13] S. L. Loyka, “Channel capacity of MIMO architecture using the expo-
nential correlation matrix,” IEEE Commun. Lett., vol. 5, pp. 369-371,
Sept. 2001.
[14] P. Robertson, E. Villebrun, and P. Hoeher, “A comparison of optimal and
sub-optimal MAP decoding algorithms operating in the log domain,” in
Proc. ICC’95, Seattle, WA, pp. 1009-1013, June 1995.

1954