Generalised sphere decoding for spatial modulation

In this paper, Sphere Decoding (SD) algorithms for Spatial Modulation (SM) are developed to reduce the computational complexity of Maximum-Likelihood (ML) detectors. Two SDs specifically designed for SM are proposed and analysed in terms of Bit Error Ratio (BER) and computational complexity. Using Monte Carlo simulations and mathematical analysis, it is shown that by carefully choosing the initial radius the proposed sphere decoder algorithms offer the same BER as ML detection, with a significant reduction in the computational complexity. A tight closed form expression for the BER performance of SM-SD is derived in the paper, along with an algorithm for choosing the initial radius which provides near to optimum performance.