Nonbinary Turbo-Coded Spatial Modulation over PAPR-Limited Channel

This paper proposes a novel coded spatial modulation technique with nonbinary signaling based on a nonbinary turbo-coding approach. The aim of this work is to improve the average bit error rate (BER) performance over a peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR)-limited channel. The use of nonbinary signaling such as hexagonal quadrature amplitude modulation (HQAM), has been studied as a technique that can mitigate the PAPR. However, it is not suitable for the transmission of binary information because the number of modulation level cannot be given by a power of two, which leads to translation loss from nonbinary to binary numbers. On the other hand, generalized spatial modulation (GSM) has been proposed as an extended version of spatial modulation (SM) and it can boost the transmission rate. However, the number of modulation levels of GSM cannot be given by a power of two. This work proposes to jointly design coded spatial modulation composed of nonbinary signaling and nonbinary SM i.e., GSM, by using nonbinary turbo coding. Simulation results demonstrate the improved BER the proposed coded SM over a PAPR-limited channel.