  In this paper, we propose a spatial coded modulation (SCM) scheme, which
improves the accuracy of the active antenna detection by coding over the
transmit antennas. Specifically, the antenna activation pattern in the SCM
corresponds to a codeword in a properly designed codebook with a larger minimum
Hamming distance than its counterpart conventional spatial modulation. As the
minimum Hamming distance increases, the reliability of the active antenna
detection is directly enhanced, which in turn improves the demodulation of the
modulated symbols and yields a better system reliability. In addition to the
reliability, the proposed SCM scheme also achieves a higher capacity with the
identical antenna configuration compared to the conventional spatial modulation
technique. Moreover, the proposed SCM scheme strikes a balance between spectral
efficiency and reliability by trading off the minimum Hamming distance with the
number of available codewords. The optimal maximum likelihood detector is first
formulated. Then, a low-complexity suboptimal detector is proposed to reduce
the computational complexity, which has a two-step detection. Theoretical
derivations of the channel capacity and the bit error rate are presented in
various channel scenarios, i.e., Rayleigh, Rician, Nakagami-m, imperfect
channel state information, and spatial correlation. Further derivation on
performance bounding is also provided to reveal the insight of the benefit of
increasing the minimum Hamming distance. Numerical results validate the
analysis and demonstrate that the proposed SCM outperforms the conventional
spatial modulation techniques in both channel capacity and system reliability.
