Channel Estimation for Spatial Modulation Schemes in Spatially Correlated Time Varying Channels

In this paper, we propose a channel estimation scheme for spatial modulation (SM) systems. In general, SM systems require each transmit antenna to separately send pilot symbols for channel estimation. This is a lengthy process, which may incur significant channel estimation errors in a time varying channel. Thus, we propose correlation-based channel estimation (CBCE) scheme, which exploits the correlation between transmit antennas to estimate channels of inactive antennas using the pilot-based estimate of the active antenna. The change in the active channel from the last pilot-based estimate is calculated, and a time-proportionate amount of that change is scaled according to the channel correlation coefficients to estimate the channel state of the inactive channels. With pilot slots designed to spread out in a data frame, the estimation process for every channel is carried out N-t times in a data frame with N-t denoting the number of transmit antennas. We observe that in a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, our proposed scheme provides about 2 dB and 5 dB gains compared to conventional channel estimation (CCE) method for moderately correlated and highly correlated antennas, respectively. Through Monte Carlo simulations with different correlation rho and user speeds, we validate our analysis and show that the proposed scheme outperforms CCE when rho >= 0.3, while it provides comparable performance for small rho.