Mutual information and capacity

of spatial modulation systems

Florina Andreea Prisecaru

School of Engineering and Science

Jacobs University Bremen
Campus Ring 1
28759 Bremen
Germany

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. H. Haas

1 Abstract

The following report deals with analyzing the mutual information and system capacity of a spatial
modulation (SM) transmission system. The potential gains of multiple antenna transmissions over
single-antenna systems are rather large under independence assumptions for the fades and noises at
different receiving antennas. SM is a new approach of multiple antenna transmission that was devel-
oped recently. The idea behind this system is to map the block of information bits to two information
units: a unique transmit antenna number chosen from o set of transmit antennas and a symbol cho-
sen from a constellation diagram. The first step done in order to analyze the mutual information
and the capacity of SM, was to find the bit-error probability (BER) of the system. Using the bit-
error probability and Shannon’s communication theory, the capacity of SM system was obtained both
analytically and in simulations.

1
Contents
1 Abstract 1

2 Introduction 3
2.1 Summary Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2 Guided research question and Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

3 Background Research 4
3.1 MIMO systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2 Mutual information and system capacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2.1 Capacity of MIMO systems with Rayleigh fading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.3 SM system model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.3.1 Estimating the transmit antenna number . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.3.2 Estimating the transmission symbol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

4 Capacity evaluation and results 9

5 Conclusion and Future work 11

2
2 Introduction

2.1 Summary Description

Wireless communication proves to be one of the fastest growing segments of the communications
industry. During the last decade, cellular systems have experienced an exponential growth and novel
transmission approaches have been discovered. Wireless technologies face challenges of signal fad-
ing, multi-path, limited spectrum or increasing interference. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
technologies exploit the multi-path to provide high data throughput, and an increase in range and
reliability without exhausting the extra radio frequency.
MIMO technologies are the ones that have antenna arrays at both transmitter and receiver [1]. The
studies done up to now reveal that the use of multiple antennas will increase the achievable data
rates on fading environments [2]. MIMO-OFDM (MIMO frequency division multiplexing) seems
to be a promising wireless technology since MIMO systems brings an increase in spectral efficiency,
while OFDM converts a frequency-selective channel into a set of narrowband flat fading orthogonal
sub-channels where the the bandwidth is used efficiently [3].
At the same time, the development of multi-antenna transmission faces several setbacks. The prob-
lems can be determined by different sources:
• Multiple antenna transmission systems face high inter-channel-interference (ICI) at the receiver
due to simultaneous transmission on the same frequency from multiple transmit antenna.
• The performance of the system is a trade off against the receiver complexity. Multiple antenna
transmission seems to achieve high performance in idealistic channel conditions. However, the
performance decreases substantially under non-ideal channel conditions [4].
One solution to these problems is to use spatial modulation (SM) [5], [6]. For this system, the
transmission is done from a single antenna at any instance of time. In order to increase efficiency,
SM uses the active antenna number as added source of information. In this case the antenna number
is used as source of information, but as spatial constellation. In order to achieve this, SM uses a
block of information bits into constellation point in the signal domain, and a constellation point in the
spatial domain. Only one antenna will be transmitting a signal with full power, while the remaining
ones will transmit zero power. Due to this approach, the ICI at the receiver input and the need to
synchronize the transmitting antennas will be avoided. In order to estimate the antenna number and
the symbol transmitted, maximum ratio combining (MRRC) at the receiver will be used.

2.2 Guided research question and Related Work

One of the newly developed transmission techniques in wireless communication is SM. This project
deals with calculating the capacity of a wireless system that uses SM. The capacity of the system
is given by the amount of discrete information that can be reliably transmitted over a channel. In
over to evaluate the capacity of a system concepts like mutual information and entropy of the system
are going to be used. At the same time, another important factor in developing this project is the
analytical process of estimating the bit error ratio. This could lead to wireless systems that are much
more noise-resistant, and therefore can provide clearer communication and higher data rates.
In order to analyze the SM system’s capacity and mutual information, the following steps were taken:
• Analyzing the SM system behavior and its bit error probability.
• Finding the mathematical representation of the mutual information and capacity for the system.

3
3 Background Research
In order to complete the tasks of this project, the following topics were analyzed:

3.1 MIMO systems

The potential gains of a multi-antenna system over single antenna systems, can be analyzed by con-
sidering a single user Gaussian channel with multiple transmitting and/or receiving antennas. The
linear model that represents such a system is [3]:

y = Hx + n (1)

where H - is a complex matrix H ∈ C Nr ×Nt ;

y ∈ C Nr ;
x ∈ C Nt ;
Nr - is the number of receiving antennas;
Nt - is the number of transmitting antennas;
n - is the Gaussian noise with independent equal variance and real and imaginary parts.
Since the noises corrupting different receivers are independent, we can conclude that E[nnT ] = INr .
The transmitter is constraint to its total power P which is mathematically expressed by: E[xxT ] ≤ P
[2].
Several scenarios of H should be considered when the system is analyzed:
1. H - deterministic
2. H - random matrix (chosen according to a probability distribution). Each channel is considered
to have an independent realisation of H
3. H - random, but fixed after it is being chosen
The last two cases are of most interest. The case H is random, it is assumed that all the entries
belong to independent identically distributed Gaussian collection that has zero mean, independent
real and imaginary parts, each of the with 1/2 variance. At the same time H has uniform phase and
Rayleigh fading environment with enough separation within the receiving and transmitting antennas,
so that the fades for each transmitting- receiving antenna pair are independent. A Rayleigh fading
environment can be applied to any city existing nowadays. In all cases of H presented above, there
is the assumption that H is known at the receiver and that the channel output has form (y, H) and H
is known at the transmitter.

3.2 Mutual information and system capacity

The growing demand for communication gives a great importance to determine the capacity limits
of channels for the systems available nowadays. These capacity limits show the maximum data rates
that can be transmitted over wireless channel with asymptotically small error probability, without
considering the constraints given by the encoder and decoder. One of the pioneers of the mathematical
theory of channel capacity was Claude Shannon. His theory is based on the the notion of the mutual
information between the input and the output of a system [7]. Shannon defined channel capacity

4
as the channel’s mutual information maximized over the all the possible input distributions. The
information channel capacity of a discrete memoryless channel [8] is:

C = |{z}
max I(X; Y ) (2)
p(x)

where I(X, Y ) - represents the average mutual information.

Considering X as the input and Y as the discrete output/detected output of the system, the mutual
information is given by [9]:
I(X, Y ) = H(Y ) − H(Y |X) (3)

where H(X) - represents the entropy.

1
The entropy of X is interpreted as the expected value of log2 p(X) , where X is drawn according to
the probability mass function p(x) [9]:
 
1 X 1
H(x) = Ep log2 = p(xi ) log2 (4)
p(X) p(xi)
xi ∈X

Thus, when bounding the mutual information we get the following:

X
I(X; Y ) = H(Y ) − H(Y |X) = H(Y ) − p(xi )H(Y |X = x)
xi ∈X
X
= H(Y ) − p(xi )H(p) = H(Y ) − H(p) = 1 − H(p) (5)
xi ∈X

where p - represents the transition probability of the system.

In order to evaluate the capacity and mutual information of a system we need the transition bit-error
probability p.

3.2.1 Capacity of MIMO systems with Rayleigh fading

The mutual information between the input and the output is given by eqn. (6). In the MIMO system
case, we know x is constrained to have covariance Q.In order to achieve the channel capacity, we
need to maximize the I(x : y|H = H), which means we need to have the mutual information as
a circularly symmetric Gaussian of covariance Q. Since Q is non-negative definite we can write
Q = U DU T and we get that [3]:

I(x; (y, H)) = E[log det(INr + (HU )D(HU )T )] (6)

For fixed Nr , using the law of large numbers we get [2]:

Nr log(1 + P ) (7)

When evaluating the capacity of such system, using the Wishart distribution and the Laguerre poly-
nomials we get that the channel capacity is [2]:
Z 0 m−1
X
log(1 + P/Nt ) [Ln−m
k ]2 λn−m e−λdλ (8)
∞ k=0

5
3.3 SM system model

In order to increase the spectral efficiency of a wireless system, SM considers the active transmit an-
tenna number as added information for the signal. The fact that the antenna pattern is used as spatial
constellation, but not as a source of information makes the difference between SM and MIMO (Mul-
tiple Input - Multiple Output). SM is applied to OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing).
Furthermore, we are basing our analysis of system capacity on i.i.d. Rayleigh channels.
The SM-OFDM system model is presented in Fig. 1 is [5].

Figure 1: SM-OFDM system model

Q(k) is an m × n binary matrix that is going to be transmitted in one OFDM symbol, where m repre-
sents the total number of bits/symbol/subchannel and n is the total number of OFDM sub-channels.
Using SM, the matrix Q(k) is mapped in another matrix X(k), of size Nt × n, where Nt is the total
number of transmit antennas [5]. As we observe from Fig.1, each column vector Q(k) is mapped into
a BPSK (binary phase shift keying) constellation point and a single transmit antenna number among
the set of four antennas. The constellation diagram and the number of transmit antennas determine
the total number of bits that are going to be transmit on each channel at each time instance.
As a rule for each OFDM sub-channel for a system using M-QAM (m = log2 (M )) constellation
diagram size and Nt transmit antennas is given by [6]:

m̃ = log2 (Nt ) + m (9)

This equation also shows that the number of transmit antennas can be traded off by for any number
of information bits. In order to analyze the SM system capacity and mutual information, we have
to find the probability that the de-mapped bits are correct. Due to the SM system’s design, first,
the estimation of the transmit antenna number is detected, and then the estimation of the transmitted
symbol is performed. So, computing the overall bit error probability of the system requires analyzing
two processes:
• Estimating the transmit antenna number.
• Estimating the transmission symbol.

6
The overall bit-error probability is given if both the bits of the antenna detection number and the bits
representing the symbol are correct [5].

Pcb = 1 − (1 − Pab )(1 − Pdb ) (10)

where Pab - represents the bit error probability that the antenna number is incorrect; Pdb - represents
the bit error probability that the symbol is incorrect; Pac - represents the overall bit error probability.

3.3.1 Estimating the transmit antenna number

The antenna number is estimated as the position of maximum of the absolute value of the result after
m
MRRC. Assuming the µi is the real part of a transmitted symbol, then µ has lenght c = 2 2 −1 and
consists of positive real part elements of the constellation diagram. P (µi ) denotes the probability that
the antenna estimation number is incorrect when transmitting µi [5]:

Z x3 Z x2 Z x1 
1 2 2 2
P (µi ) = fx4 (x|µi , σ )dx + fx4 (x|µi , σ )dx + fx4 (x|µi , σ )dx (11)
Nt − 1 0 0 0

where fxi - represents the pdf of a Gaussian random distribution with mean µi and variance σ; x1 , x2 ,
x3 - represent the intersection points of fx1 (x|0, σ 2 ), fx2 (x|0, σ 2 ), fx3 (x|0, σ 2 ) with fx4 (x|µi , σ 2 ).
The total average probability of error for antenna number estimation is given by [5]:
c
1 X
Par = × P (µi ) (12)
c i=1

Considering both the imaginary and the real parts, the overall probability of error is given by [8]:

Pa = 1 − (1 − Par )2 (13)

where P( a) - represents the symbol error probability that the detected antenna number is incorrect.
The bit error probability can be derived by considering the number of transmit antennas (Nt ). Keeping
in mind that the transmitted symbol has log2 (Nt ) bits and the fact that one erroneous bit gives us an
erroneous symbol, we get the following relationship:

Pa = 1 − (1 − Pab )log2 (Nt ) (14)

Using binomial expansion we get:

Pa = 1 − 1 + log2 (Nt ) × Pab − ... ≈ log2 (Nt ) × Pab (15)

Thus, the antenna estimation bit-error probability is:

Pa
Pab ≈ (16)
log2 (Nt )

7
3.3.2 Estimating the transmission symbol

The estimation of the transmitted symbol for a square M-QAM modulation that uses Nr receiving
antennas is given by [10]:
 Z π    2 Z π  
4 1 2 −gQAM 4 1 4 −gQAM
Pd = 1− √ Φ γl dφ − 1− √ Φ γl dφ (17)
π M 0 sin(φ)2 π M 0 sin(φ)2

where gQAM = 3 log2 (M )/2(M − 1); Φγl is moment generating function for Rayleigh fading
channels; γl is the average SNR at each receving antenna.
The bit error probability can be derived by considering the constellation size of the M-QAM modula-
tion technique used. Keeping in mind that the transmitted symbol has log2 (M ) bits and the fact that
one erroneous bit gives us an erroneous symbol, we get the following relationship:

Pd = 1 − (1 − Pdb )log2 (M ) (18)

Using binomial expansion we get:

Pd = 1 − 1 + log2 (M ) × Pdb − ... ≈ log2 (M ) × Pdb (19)

Thus, the bit-error probability for the symbol estimation is given by:
Pd
Pdb ≈ (20)
log2 (M )

8
4 Capacity evaluation and results
In order to calculate the capacity of the SM system, the MIMO capacity approach could not be used
due to the fact that the antenna number represents added information. Furthermore, the antenna
pattern is is considered as spatial constellation, and not as source of information. Thus, in order
to compute the system’s capacity, the eqn. (5) was used. The probability p is given by the overall
bit-error probability:

C = 1 − H(Pcb ) = 1 + Pcb log2 (Pcb ) + (1 − Pcb ) log2 (1 − Pcb ) (21)

The overall spectral efficienty becomes:

Co = m̃(1 − H(Pcb )) = m̃(1 + Pcb log2 (Pcb ) + (1 − Pcb ) log2 (1 − Pcb )) (22)

The next step was obtaining the plot the system capacity for a certain number of transmit antennas
(Nt ) and QAM constellation size (M ), against the signal-to-noise ratio. In order to achieve this plot
eqn. (10) and (20) were used.
The following figure shows the capacity performance of SM-OFDM channel.

Figure 2: Capacity curve

Six bits transmission (m̃ = 6) can be acheived by using 4x4 16-QAM SM, ob by using 16x4 4-QAM
SM. As expected, the overall capacity of the system approaches the theoretical number of bits ex-
pected on each OFDM channel. An interesting behavior of the system is observed: for small SNR
values (< 2.9 dB) the capacity of the system using 4 transmit antennas with 16-QAM is higher than
the one that uses 16 transmit antennas and 4-QAM modulation. However, for higher SNR values, the

9
system with a higher number of antennas seems to be more efficient. Thus, Figure 2 shows also the
trade off between the number of transmit antennas used and the constellation size. It was shown in
[5], that at high SNR we get smaller bit error probability for less QAM constellation size. On the
other hand, in terms of capacity, it is observed that capacity increases with higher number of anten-
nas and smaller constellation size. For instance, if the channel is bad (low SNR), but the antennas
are almost uncorrelated, it is better to use higher constellation size and smaller number of transmit
antennas. At the same time, if the channel is good (high SNR), the smaller the QAM size, the better
the system capacity.

The figure presented below shows the capacity of SM-OFDM system with Nt = 4 when using 64-
QAM and for Nt = 16 using 16-QAM was done.

Figure 3: Capacity curve

In this case we are dealing with 8 bits transmission (m̃ = 8). It is observed that the overall capacity
of the system approaches the theoretical number of bits expected on each OFDM channel. Moreover,
for small SNR values (< 6 dB), the capacity of the system using 4 transmit antennas with 64-QAM
is higher than the one that uses 16 transmit antennas and 16-QAM modulation. The most efficient
system in terms of capacity seems to be the one with higher number of antennas. Figure 3 proves the
trade off between the number of transmit antennas used and the constellation size according to certain
SNR values. Furthermore, in [5], we expected better performance of the bit error ratio with smaller
QAM constellation size. The capacity shows a different behaviour. If a channel has low SNR, the
capacity is higher for bigger number of constellation points. Alternatively, for high SNR values, the
channel has a better capacity for smaller constellation size.

10
5 Conclusion and Future work
SM, a multiple antenna transmission approach, was applied to OFDM. The performance of SM in
i.i.d. Rayleigh flat fading channels was derived using both analytical and simulation methods. In
terms of channel capacity and mutual information, it was observed that for high SNR values the sys-
tem achieves the theoretical number of bits expected on each OFDM channel. Moreover the trade
off between the number of transmit antennas used and constellation size was shown by the simula-
tions presented. At the same time, it was observed that the system capacity has a different behavior
than the bit error probability in terms of SNR and constellation size. Future work will concentrate
on adaptive algorithms that would improve the system capacity. These algorithms will base on the
trade off between the number of transmit antennas and the signal modulation techniques. At the same
time, the same approach will be applied to more QAM constellation sizes and transmit number of
antennas for the same number of transmission bits. This might lead to a special type of adaptive mod-
ulation. Moreover, SM would be applied to different signal modulation techniques and comparisons
with other space-time-coding methods should be considered.

References
[1] A.F. Molisch, M. Z. Win, Y.S. Choi, and J.H. Winters. Capacity of mimo systems with antenna
selection. In IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Vol. 4, no. 4, July 2005.
[2] E.Telatar. Capacity of multi-antenna gaussian channels. In European transaction Telecommu-
nications, Vol. 10, no. 6, November,December 1999.
[3] A. Goldsmith. Wireless Communications. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
[4] A. Goldsmith, S. Jafar, N. Jindal, and S. Vishwanath. Capacity limits of mimo channels. In
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication, Vol. 21, no. 2, pp.684-702, June 2003.
[5] R. Mesleh, H. Haas, S. Sinanovic, C.W. Ahn, and S. Yun. Spatial modulation. Technical report,
Jacobs University Bremen, April 2007.
[6] R. Mesleh, H. Haas, C.W. Ahn, and S. Yun. Spatial modulation - a new low complexity spec-
tral efficiency enhancing technique. In IEEE International Conference on Communication and
Networking in China (CHINACOM’ 06), October 2006.
[7] C.E. Shannon. A mathematical theory of communication. In The Bell System Technical Journal,
Vol. 27, July 1948.
[8] J.G. Proakis. Digital Communications. McGRAW-HILL, 2002.
[9] T.M. Cover and J.A. Thomas. Elements of Information Theory. Wiley, 1991.
[10] Y. Ma and C.C. Chai. Unified error probability analysis for generalized selection combining in
nakagami fading channels. In IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 18, no.
11, November 2000.

11