The conventional generalized spatial modulation (GSM) simultaneously activates multiple transmit antennas in order to improve the spectral efficiency of the original SM. In this letter, to lessen the hardware burden of the multiple RF chains, we provide a new scheme that is designed by combining the GSM scheme using only two active antennas with quaternary quasi-orthogonal sequences of a length of two. Compared with the other SM schemes, the proposed scheme has significant benefits in average error performances and/or their hardware complexities of the RF systems.

In this paper, we propose a new spatial modulation (SM) scheme based on quaternary quasi-orthogonal sequences (Q-QOSs), referred to as Q-QOS-SM. First, the conventional SM and generalized-SM (GSM) schemes are reinterpreted as a new transmission scheme based on a spatial modulation matrix (SMM), whose column indices are used for the mapping of spatial-information bits unlike the conventional ones. Next, by adopting the SMM comprising the Q-QOSs, the proposed Q-QOS-SM that guarantees twice the number of spatial bits at a transmitter compared with the SM with a constraint of transmit antennas, is designed. From the computer-simulation results, the Q-QOS-SM is shown to achieve a greatly improved throughput compared with the conventional SM and GSM schemes, especially, for a large number of the receive antennas. This finding is mainly because the new scheme offers a much higher minimum Euclidean distance than the other schemes.