Enhanced Fully Generalized Spatial Modulation for the Internet of Underwater Things

Sensors (Basel). 2019 Mar 28;19(7):1519. doi: 10.3390/s19071519.

Abstract

A full design of the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) with a high data rate is one of the greatest underwater communication difficulties due to the unavailability of a sustainable power source for the battery supplies of sensor nodes, electromagnetic spread weakness, and limited acoustic waves channel bandwidth. This paper presents a new energy-efficient communication scheme named Enhanced Fully Generalized Spatial Modulation (EFGSM) for the underwater acoustic channel, where the different number of active antennas used in Fully Generalized Spatial Modulation (FGSM) is combined with multiple signal constellations. The proposed EFGSM enhances energy efficiency over conventional schemes such as spatial modulation, generalized spatial modulation, and FGSM. In order to increase energy and spectral performance, the proposed technique conveys data bits not just by the number of active antenna's index as in the existing traditional FGSM, but also using the type of signal constellation to increase the data bit rate and improve power saving without increasing the receiver's complexity. The proposed EFGSM uses primary and secondary constellations as indexes to carry information, they are derived from others by geometric interpolation signal space. The performance of the suggested EFGSM is estimated and demonstrated through Monte Carlo simulation over an underwater acoustic channel. The simulation results confirm the advantage of the suggested EFGSM scheme not just regarding energy and spectral efficiency but also concerning the average bit error rate (ABER).

Keywords: FGSM; IoUT; energy efficiency; spatial modulation; spectral efficiency.