Spatial Modulation for Terahertz Communication Systems with Hardware Impairments

Terahertz (THz) communication has emerged as a promising technology that efficiently alleviates the scarcity of the frequency resources, and is capable of providing Terabit-per-second (Tbps) data transmission. However, the hardware impairments, which are usually omitted in the low-rate systems, have a detrimental impact on the THz communication link. These hardware imperfections, including in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) imbalance, phase noise and nonlinearities of the power amplifier, can be approximately modelled as complex-Gaussian distortions at both the transmitter and the receiver. In this paper, the channel estimator and signal detector (CE/SD) design of the THz-band spatial modulation (THz-SM) system is investigated, where the counterparts for classical low-rate SM are no longer applicable. More specifically, a dual-stage maximum-likelihood (ML) channel estimator is proposed containing two phases of candidate acquirement and exhaustive search. Then a novel low-complexity mean-least-squares (MLS) channel estimator is developed by considering the hardware impairments in an averaging manner. Besides, the optimal detector for THz-SM is designed by taking hardware impairments into account. Simulation results validate that the proposed CE/SD design is capable of attaining reliable data transmission in THz-SM with hardware imperfections.