Enabling Joint Tx-Rx Spatial Modulation with RF Mirrors

Joint Tx-Rx spatial modulation (JSM) is a recently emerged multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scheme, which is able to simultaneously achieve the transmit diversity, receive diversity and multiplexing gain. In this article, we propose and investigate a novel JSM framework, where the antennas of the transmitter are surrounded by RF mirrors. In contrast to the conventional JSM, the novel JSM is implemented by utilizing a single RF chain powered transmitter, and hence is capable of achieving decreased cost and improved flexibility for realization. To provide our novel JSM with enhanced diversity, an alternative null-space beamforming (ANB) based transmitter preprocessing scheme is proposed. To achieve different tradeoff between reliability and complexity, we introduce two types of detection algorithms, i.e., the maximum-likelihood detection (MLD) and the receiving power sorting based detection. Furthermore, we analyse the capacity and the error performance of the proposed ANB-JSM systems employing the MLD, so as to gain insights into the advantages of the novel JSM. Numerical results demonstrate that our JSM can outperform its conventional counterpart in the aspects of both performance and applicability.