Abstract—A novel M-algorithm-based detector, namely M-algorithm to maximum-likelihood (M-ML), for spatial modulation (SM) receiver is proposed recently, however, due to the miscalculation of metrics, bit-error-rate (BER) performance of M-ML is far away from optimal actually. In this paper, a modified M-ML detector, which calculates accumulated metrics of each layer and can achieve optimal BER performance, is proposed; Furthermore, an M-algorithm-based constellation-reduction (MCR) method specially for SM in high correlated environment is proposed, MCR is capable of combining with maximum-likelihood (ML) and M-ML to further reduce complexity. The BER performance of M–ML and MCR is simulated, simulation results show that the proposed detectors can achieve almost the same BER performance to ML detector while reducing the computational complexity significantly.

Index Terms—Spatial modulation, M-algorithm, correlated channel, maximum-likelihood

Cite: Zengshan Tian, Zhe Li, Mu Zhou, and Xiaobo Yang, "M-Algorithm-Based Optimal Detectors for Spatial Modulation," Journal of Communications, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 245-251, 2015. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.10.4.245-251