Energy Efficiency of Generalized Spatial Modulation Aided Massive MIMO Systems

One of focuses in green communication studies is the energy efficiency (EE) of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Although the massive MIMO technology can improve the spectral efficiency (SE) of cellular networks by configuring a large number of antennas at base stations (BSs), the energy consumption of radio frequency (RF) chains increases dramatically. The increment of energy consumption is caused by the increase of RF chain number to match the antenna number in massive MIMO communication systems. To overcome this problem, a generalized spatial modulation (GSM) solution is presented to simultaneously reduce the number of RF chains and maintain the SE of massive MIMO communication systems. A EE model is proposed to estimate the transmission and computation power of massive MIMO communication systems with GSM. Simulation results demonstrate that the EE of massive MIMO communication systems with GSM outperforms the massive MIMO communication systems without GSM. Besides, the computation power consumed by massive MIMO communication systems with GSM is effectively reduced.