Extended Signed Quadrature Spatial Modulation System With Multi-User Support

Signed quadrature spatial modulation (SQSM) was recently introduced to enhance the throughput of spatial modulation (SM) in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. This strategy involves independently transmitting the real and imaginary components of a symbol and its inverse from four independent antennas. In this paper, an extended SQSM (ESQSM) system is proposed. It combines
$K$
SQSM constellations and transmits them from the same transmit-antenna set with the aim of realizing a
$K$
-fold improvement in the spectral efficiency (SE). The proposed ESQSM employs the average power of the
$K$
SQSM constellations as an additional dimension for transmission. Performance of the proposed ESQSM surpasses that of other state-of-art SM systems such as the QSM, DSM, IQSM SQSM, and EQSM by 13 dB, 11 dB, 10.55 dB, 10 dB, and 6.8 dB, respectively. In this paper, we also propose an efficient ESQSM with a multi-user (ESQSM-MU) system inspired by the ESQSM ability in increasing the SE. The proposed ESQSM-MU system offers a significant bit error rate (BER) improvement and a higher capacity (i.e.,
$5K$
-users) compared to the current non orthogonal multiple access-SM (NOMA-SM) and SM-assisted multi-antenna NOMA (SM-AMA-NOMA) systems. Moreover, an efficient low-complexity detector is introduced for the ESQSM signal detection, promising a 91.2% reduction in the computational complexity of ESQSM and ESQSM-MU systems relative to the maximum likelihood (ML) with a trivial loss in performance.