2013 IEEE 24th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications: Fundamentals and PHY Track
Channel Estimation for Spatial Modulation
Xiping Wu∗ , Marco Di Renzo†, and Harald Haas∗
∗ Institute
for Digital Communications
Joint Research Institute for Signal and Image Processing
School of Engineering
The University of Edinburgh
EH9 3JL, Edinburgh, UK
{xiping.wu, h.haas}@ed.ac.uk
Abstract—In single-stream multiple-input multiple-output
(MIMO) schemes, such as spatial modulation (SM) and space
shift keying (SSK), a single transmit antenna is activated at any
given time. Therefore, unlike multi-stream MIMO transmitters,
simultaneous pilot transmissions are prohibitive because of a
single radio-frequency (RF) chain. In state-of-the-art literature,
the channels of different transmit antennas are individually
estimated. As a result, more time is required to transfer pilots and
the effective data rate is compromised. In this paper, we propose a
novel channel estimation (CE) technique for single-stream MIMO
systems. Given a pilot ratio, the proposed scheme achieves the
same estimation period as multi-stream MIMO systems without
needing any additional information or feedback. Simulations
are implemented under a practical base station environment.
Results show that for various speeds of the mobile user, the
proposed approach significantly improves the performance of SM
in comparison to the conventional CE method.
Index Terms—Channel estimation, multiple-input multiple-
output (MIMO), single-stream, spatial modulation (SM)
I. I NTRODUCTION
W IRELESS systems continue to strive for exponen-
tially increasing traffic loads. To mitigate the enor-
mous resource consumption in bandwidth and energy, the
space domain has been exploited to increase the channel
capacity, i.e., multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems.
With respect to the number of activated transmit antennas,
MIMO techniques can be categorized into two types: multi-
stream and single-stream. Multi-stream MIMO schemes, such
as vertical Bell Labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) and
space-time block coding (STBC), convey different information
through multiple active transmit antennas. In contrast, spatial
modulation (SM) is a relatively new single-stream MIMO
transmission technique, which achieves a multiplexing gain by
considering antenna locations as spatial constellation points
[1], [2]. Unlike conventional multi-stream MIMO schemes,
SM activates only one antenna at a given time and therefore,
fully avoids inter-channel interference (ICI). In [1]–[3], as-
suming perfect channel state information (CSI), it has been
presented that SM offers a better performance than many state-
of-the-art MIMO schemes while achieving a low-complexity
implementation.
However, perfect channel knowledge is always impractical
and channel estimation (CE) is essential to all of the above
schemes. A massive body of literature, e.g., [4] and [5], exists
978-1-4577-1348-4/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE 306
† French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)
Laboratory for Signals and Systems (LSS)
École Supérieure d’Électricité (SUPELEC)
3 rue Joliot-Curie, 91192 Gif-sur-Yvette (Paris), France
marco.direnzo@lss.supelec.fr
on the topic of CE for multi-stream MIMO systems, in which
all channels can be estimated simultaneously. Meanwhile,
regardless of the number of antennas used, SM only employs
a single radio-frequency (RF) chain including a single power
amplifier and thus, exhibits significant energy savings [6].
However, at each time, the pilots can be sent out through
only one transmit antenna as well. Consequently, using pilot-
based channel estimation, only the channel knowledge of
the active transmit antenna can be obtained at the receiver.
This leads to a challenge in channel estimation for single-
stream MIMO techniques, since more time is required to
estimate the full MIMO channel. In other words, for a fixed
pilot ratio, i.e., the ratio between pilot and total transmission
time, the estimation period is proportional to the number of
transmit antennas. Therefore, single-stream MIMO schemes
suffer more from CE errors, especially for a fast fading
scenario. Until now, little research has been conducted in this
field. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, only in [7] and [8],
CE techniques specifically tailored for SM are proposed. They
use recursive least-square (RLS) and joint channel estimation
with data detection, respectively. However, both methods were
developed based on existing techniques and did not cope with
the issue of more estimation time consumption.
Against this background, a novel channel estimation ap-
proach for single-stream MIMO schemes is proposed in this
paper. By exploiting channel correlation, this new method
greatly reduces the channel estimation time without increasing
the pilot ratio. Moreover, there is no need for any extra infor-
mation or feedback. An SM system is considered to study the
proposed method and to evaluate its performance compared to
a conventional CE technique used as a benchmark. A practical
spatial channel model [9], which is consistent with a channel
model developed within the 3rd Generation Partnership Project
(3GPP), is used to validate our technique. Simulation results
demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outper-
forms the benchmark channel estimation scheme.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section
II describes the system model, including the SM structure,
channel model and channel estimator. In Section III, the novel
channel estimation approach for SM is proposed. Section IV
presents the simulation results. The paper is summarized in
Section V.

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Fig. 1. Nt × Nr Spatial Modulation System Model

TABLE I
II. S YSTEM M ODEL PARAMETERS S ETTING OF S PATIAL C HANNEL M ODEL
A. MIMO System
Parameter Value
A Nt × Nr SM-MIMO system is considered where Nt and
Nr are the numbers of transmit antennas and receive antennas, Number of BS Elements Nt

respectively. Fig. 1 illustrates the system structure which is Number of MS Elements Nr

comprised of an SM mapper, Nt transmit antennas, MIMO Height of BS 32 m
channels, Nr receive antennas, and a detector. Height of MS 1.5 m
In the SM mapper, the bit stream is divided into blocks BS Antenna Separation 1 wavelength
with the length of ηs bits, where ηs represents the spectrum MS Velocity 1 / 5 / 10 m/s
efficiency. The block at the discrete time index k is denoted as Scenario ‘urban micro’
q(k). Each block is then split into two units of log2 (Nt ) bits
Number of Paths 6
and log2 (M ) bits, where M = 2ηs /Nt is the size of signal
Carrier Center Frequency 2 GHz
constellation points. The first part activates a single antenna
from the spatial constellation, and we denote the currently
active transmit antenna as t. The second part determines
the corresponding symbol from a specific signal constellation with distribution CN (0, N0 ). Across the receive antennas, the
diagram, such as quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and noise components are statistically independent. We define the
phase shift keying (PSK), and sends it through the activated signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as γ = Em /N0 , where Em is
antenna. Thus, the transmitted signal can be represented by the average energy per symbol transmission. At the receiver,
a vector x = [x1 , x2 , ..., xNt ]T , where all elements are zero estimated CSI is used to decode the transmitted symbol by the
except xt . joint maximum likelihood (ML) detection.
By denoting the channel gain between the i-th transmit
antenna and the j-th receive antenna as hj,i , the MIMO B. Channel Model
channel H can be written as: With the aim to evaluate the proposed approach in a prac-
tical environment, the spatial channel model (SCM) proposed
⎡ ⎤
h1,1 h1,2 ··· h1,Nt in [9] is implemented. Complying with 3GPP TR 25.996, this
⎢h h2,2 ··· h2,Nt ⎥ particular model provides time-variant channels for MIMO
⎢ 2,1 ⎥
H=⎢
⎢ .. .. .. ..
⎥
⎥ (1) simulations. In order to offer a reasonable separation between
⎣ . . . . ⎦ transmit antennas, simulations are carried out assuming the
downlinks. Three scenarios are supported in SCM: urban
hNr ,1 hNr ,2 · · · hNr ,Nt
macro, urban micro and suburban macro. In this paper the
and the received signal at the k-th time index is given by: urban micro scenario with a single user is assumed, and path
loss and lognormal shadowing are not considered. Furthermore
y(k) = H(k)x(k) + w(k) (2)
for each channel realization, the mobile user is uniformly
where w = [w1 , w2 , ..., wNr ]T is the noise vector. At the distributed in a circular cell with the inner and outer radius of
input of each receive antenna, the noise is assumed to be 35 and 500 meters, respectively. Some important parameters
a complex Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) process are specified in Table I. Due to the space limitation, we refer

307










 
 

Fig. 2. Block diagram of conventional channel estimation for SM


 

 

1.5 4
channel 1
channel 2  


Change of 3
||h ||
Amplitude of Channel Frequency Response

1
Fig. 4. Block diagram of the proposed channel estimation method
Phase of Channel Frequency Response

1 Change of
(||h || − ||h ||) 1
1 2
process takes up two time slots. The time interval between two
0
successive CE samples for the same transmit antenna is defined
−1
by the estimation period TCE . By denoting the symbol time as
0.5 Ts , the estimation period of the conventional CE method is
−2 calculated by:
−3
channel 1 TCE = Nt (Nd + 1)Ts (6)
channel 2
0 −4
0 100 200 300
Time Index
400 500 0 100 200 300
Time Index
400 500 where Nd is the ratio between data and pilot slots for one full
channel estimation period, i.e., the number of data symbols
per pilot.
Fig. 3. Channel realization based on SCM
B. Proposed Method

the interested reader to [9] for more detailed information about
the channel model.
C. Least Square Estimator
In this paper, least square (LS) technique is applied for
pilot-based channel estimation in both the conventional and
proposed methods. As only the t-th element in x(k) is nonzero,
the signal obtained at the j-th receive antenna in (2) can be
simplified to:
yj (k) = hj,t (k)xt (k) + wj (k)
According to [10, p. 224, Eq. (8.9)], the LS estimator of
the above equation is given by:
ĥj,t (k) = arg minyj (k) − hxt (k)2
Since xt (k) and yj (k) are both scalar, the channels of the
t-th transmit antenna are estimated by:
yj (k)
ĥj,t (k) =
xt (k)
III. C HANNEL E STIMATION
A. Conventional Channel Estimation
For single-stream MIMO schemes, conventional methods
estimate the channels of different transmit antennas sequen-
tially [7]. In Fig. 2, an illustration of the sequential CE proce-
dure is shown for a two-stream system. As can be seen, the CE
In practice, MIMO channels are correlated to some de-
gree because of the limited separation between antennas and
the given propagation environment. Based on SCM, Fig. 3
presents a realization for the channels from different transmit
antennas to the same receive antenna. The margin between
two such channels is defined by channel difference. It can
be observed that, the change of the channel difference is
relatively slow in contrast with the change of the actual
channels which is due to the channel correlation. This effect
can be exploited to improve the CE performance of single
(3) chain MIMO systems. Fig. 4 demonstrates the concept of the
proposed method. Unlike the conventional scheme, the pilots
for different antennas are equally distributed along the time
axis. For a concise expression, we denote the index of the
estimation points as n as the index of data is not involved in the
(4)
h
estimation procedure. At any estimation point, the algorithm
encompasses four steps:
i) Pilot-based CE: In this step, the pilot is sent through
the t-th transmit antenna like in the conventional method. At
each receive antenna, the channel from the currently activated
, j = 1, 2, ..., Nr (5) antenna is estimated by a specific estimator (LS in this paper)
and denoted as ĥt (n).
ii) CSI correction: For each transmit antenna, the pilot is
conveyed once for every Nt estimation points. The previous
Nt − 1 estimated CSIs of the t-th antenna are obtained via
the correlation-based CE described in step iii. Those points
can be corrected by a low-pass interpolation based on the
current channel estimation ĥt (n) and L − 1 previous estimates

308
ĥt (n − lNt ), l = 1, 2, . . . , L−1. The number of used estimates 0
10
for the currently active antenna, i.e., L, is defined by the
interpolation sequence length. After being obtained from the −1
10
interpolation, the corrected CSI of the t-th transmit antenna is
denoted as ḣt (n − n ), where n = 1, 2, . . . , Nt − 1. −2
10
Regarding the i-th transmit antenna, the latest pilot-based

Bit Error Ratio

CE happened at ni,t time slots before where: −3
10

 −4
10
t−i if i<t
ni,t = (7) Perfect CSI
Conventional CE
t − i + Nt if i > t −5
10 Proposed CE
1 m/s
5 m/s
10 m/s
Thus at the time index n − ni,t , the difference between the −6
10
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
channels of the i-th and the t-th antennas can be expressed as: SNR (dB)

(a) QPSK, 2 × 2 SM-MIMO

ΔJi,t (n − ni,t ) = ĥi (n − ni,t ) − ḣt (n − ni,t ) (8)
0
10

iii) Correlation-based CE: In contrast to the individual

channel variations, the difference between channels can be −1
10

assumed changing less rapidly. Then, the estimated CSI for

those inactive antennas, denoted as h̃i (n), can be computed −2
10

based on ĥt (n) and the previous channel difference: Bit Error Ratio
−3
10

h̃i (n) = ĥt (n) + ΔJi,t (n − ni,t ), i = t (9) −4

10

Perfect CSI
During the following data transmissions, ĥt (n) and h̃i (n) −5
10
Conventional CE
Proposed CE
are used for decoding. 1 m/s
5 m/s
iv) Antenna index update: At last, the index of the antenna −6
10
10 m/s

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
to convey the pilot next time is updated to: SNR (dB)

(b) BPSK, 4 × 2 SM-MIMO


t+1 if t < Nt Fig. 5. BER performance of SM over realistic channels at 3 bits/s/Hz
t= (10)
1 if t = Nt

It is worth noting that all computations are processed at the
receiver and no additional feedback is required. Apart from
this, the computational complexity is linear to Nt . By applying
the proposed method, the estimation period is reduced to:
TCE = (Nd + 1)Ts
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
In this section, the performance of SM based on the novel
channel estimation method is evaluated under the practical
environment depicted in Sec. II. Two benchmarks are con-
sidered for comparison: i) the conventional method, which is
denoted as “CCE” in the sequel; ii) SM with perfect CSI.
According to the long term evolution (LTE) standards [11],
the symbol time Ts = 0.07 ms and the pilot ratio is given
1
by 21 , i.e., Nd = 20. Additionally, in order to balance the
accuracy against the complexity, the interpolation sequence
length in the proposed method is chosen to be L = 9.
A. BER Performance
Fig. 5 presents the bit error ratio (BER) performance of
SM as a function of the SNR, which is the same for pilots
and data, for different number of transmit antennas, i.e., the
power for data symbols and pilots is assumed to be the same.
(11) In Fig. 5(a), a 2 × 2 SM system with quadrature PSK (QPSK)
is considered for various speeds of the mobile user. It is worth
noting that the case of perfect CSI is independent of the
user velocity. Unfortunately, the performance in the presence
of estimation error decreases while the speed increases. In
addition, the BER performance tends towards stability with
increasing SNR. This is because the CE error becomes the
dominant factor instead of noise. When compared to CCE, in
general terms, the performance of the novel approach is closer
to the performance of perfect CSI. At 1 m/s, the proposed
method outperforms CCE when SNR is larger than 25 dB.
However, for a larger user velocity, the proposed scheme is
always better than CCE. The reasons are twofold: i) at a low
velocity, the channel fading is relatively slow and thus, the

309
 Maintaining a target BER = 1x10−5 at the user speed of 1 m/s
70
Conventional CE
Energy Efficiency of Effective Data [Mbits / Joule]
Proposed CE
60
50
40
30
20
88%
10
0 sults assuming a 3GPP channel model show that the proposed
Fig. 6.
benefit of the proposed method do not fully come into play;
ii) when transferring pilots with a smaller SNR, the impact of
the CE error is strong which causes the correlation-based CE
to suffer from error propagation.
The same evaluation for a 4 × 2 SM is studied in Fig. 5(b).
Assuming perfect CSI, SM with four transmit antennas,
which exploits more spatial information, is better than two-
transmitter SM in BER performance. However, SM based on
CCE performs much worse when compared to the Nt = 2
scenario. Given an example of 5 m/s, the achievable BER of
CCE-based SM drops from 2.7 × 10−3 to 3.4 × 10−2 . The
reason for this is that CCE has a longer estimation period
with increasing Nt and the estimation error is correspondingly
much larger. In contrast, SM based on the proposed method
can still benefit from the larger Nt because its CE period is
regardless of Nt . In the same situation, the achievable BER
is improved from 6.8 × 10−5 to 3.3 × 10−5 by applying the
proposed approach.
B. Energy Efficiency
In this section, the transmitted data (not including the pilots)
per unit energy is compared between the conventional and pro-
posed CE methods in different Nt . With the aim to calculate
the RF output energy consumption at the transmitter, we as-
sume the free-space path loss is 100 dB, which corresponds to
an average receiver-transmitter separation of 1200 m assuming
the channel model used in this paper [9]. From Fig. 6, the
following outcomes can be observed. Firstly, comparing the
proposed method with CCE, the data amount per unit energy
is increased by 8.3 and 10.0 times for Nt = 2 and Nt = 4,
respectively. In other words, the novel approach saves 88%
and 90% RF output energy to convey the same amount of data.
Secondly, when the number of transmit antennas is increased
from two to four, the increase of data per unit energy in SM
based on the proposed method is much larger than CCE.
V. C ONCLUSION
A novel channel estimation scheme has been proposed for
single-stream MIMO systems. Unlike conventional methods,
where the channels from different antennas are individually
estimated, the proposed approach exploits the correlation
information between transmit antennas. Without the need for
feedback, the proposed technique achieves the same estimation
90%
period as multi-stream MIMO schemes, and consequently,
the channel estimation time is independent of the number of
transmit antennas. In contrast, the channel estimation period of
the conventional method for single RF chain MIMO systems is
proportional to the number of transmit antennas. Simulation re-
Nt = 2 N =4
t method significantly outperforms the conventional channel
estimation scheme, especially for a fast fading scenario. By
Transmit energy consumption applying the proposed method, the SM-MIMO systems can
save up to 90% RF output energy. Furthermore, the proposed
channel estimation approach allows SM to be used in deploy-
ment scenarios where it unfolds its main advantages which is
in large antenna systems. This significant improvement makes
SM a promising candidate for practical future large MIMO
systems.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We gratefully acknowledge support from the European
Union (GREENET project) for this work.
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