Incorporating Spatial Modulation for Non-Coherent Massive MIMO With DPSK Schemes

Massive MIMO (mMIMO) boasts high spectral efficiency yet grapples with two key challenges: the complexity of estimating numerous channels and the hardware constraint of requiring multiple RF chains. Solutions for these issues have been studied separately in the literature, such as Non-coherent (NC) schemes avoiding channel estimation and spatial modulation (SM) techniques reducing the need for RF chains. Still, the integration of both to enhance mMIMO schemes has not been done. This letter introduces a novel approach to integrating SM in NC-mMIMO, facilitating more practical and resource-efficient implementations in real-world applications. System performance is evaluated in single-user and multi-user scenarios, reducing computational complexity by eliminating channel estimation. In addition, hardware simplifications due to SM are promising for 6G communications.