Spatial modulation based on reconfigurable antennas: performance evaluation by using the prototype of a reconfigurable antenna

In this paper, we study the performance of spatial modulation based on reconfigurable antennas. Two main contributions are provided. We introduce an analytical framework to compute the error probability, which is shown to be accurate and useful for system optimization. We design and implement the prototype of a reconfigurable antenna that is specifically designed for application to spatial modulation and that provides multiple radiation patterns that are used to encode the information bits. By using the measured antenna radiation patterns, we show that spatial modulation based on reconfigurable antennas works in practice and that its performance can be optimized by appropriately selecting the radiation patterns to use for a given data rate.