Space-Time Block Coded Spatial Modulation Aided mmWave MIMO with Hybrid Precoding

In this paper, a combination of Space-Time Block Coded Spatial Modulation with Hybrid Analog-Digital Beamforming (STBC-SM-HBF) for 60 GHz Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications is proposed in order to take advantage of the merits of Spatial Modulation (SM), Space-Time Block Codes (STBC), Analog Beamforming (ABF), and digital precoding techniques while avoiding their drawbacks. This proposed system benefits from the multiplexing gain of SM, from the transmit diversity gain of STBC and from the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) gain of the beamformer. The simulation results demonstrate that the Zero Forcing (ZF) and the Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) precoded STBC-SM systems have better Bit Error Rate (BER) performance than the precoded SM system, and the former showed a performance degradation compared to STBC-SM system tough. Furthermore, the error performance is significantly improved by employing an array of ABF which improves the system performance as the number of antenna array elements increases due to providing a beamforming gain, which is hence of great significance to the Fifth Generation (5G) mmWave communications. In addition, it is demonstrated that a minimum of 2 antenna elements in the proposed scheme of STBC-SM-HBF are required to obtain better error performance than that of the conventional SM and STBC-SM systems under the same spectral efficiency of 2 bits/s/Hz.