On the Achievable Spectral Efficiency of Spatial Modulation Aided Downlink Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

In this letter, a novel spatial modulation aided non-orthogonal multiple access (SM-NOMA) system is proposed. We use mutual information (MI) to characterize the achievable spectral efficiency (SE) of the proposed SM-NOMA system. Due to the finite-alphabet space-domain inputs employed by SM, the expression of the corresponding MI lacks a closed-form formulation. Hence, a lower bound is proposed to quantify the MI of the SM-NOMA system. Furthermore, its asymptotic property is also theoretically investigated in both low and high signal-to-noise ratio regions. The SE performance and its analysis of our proposed SM-NOMA system are confirmed by simulation results.