Fluid Antenna Empowered Index Modulation for RIS-Aided mmWave Transmissions

In this paper, we propose a fluid antenna (FA) enabled joint transmit and receive index modulation (FA-JTR-IM) transmission mechanism for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems. By integrating the methodologies of FA and IM, the proposed scheme achieves enhanced spectral efficiency (SE) while requiring only a single radio frequency (RF) chain at both the transmitter and receiver. The proposed scheme offers a low hardware cost and power consumption transmission mechanism for the RIS-aided mmWave communication systems. Specifically, the encoding of information bits encompasses not only the modulated symbol but also the indices of transmit FA positions and receive antennas. To achieve a reliability-complexity trade-off, two types of detectors are introduced for the proposed FA-JTR-IM scheme, including the optimal maximum likelihood (ML) detector and two-step sequential (TSS) detector. Based on the ML detector, we derive the expression for the conditional pair-wise error probability of the proposed FA-JTR-IM scheme. Additionally, we provide the closed-form expressions for the unconditional PEP under the finite-path and infinite-path channel conditions, respectively. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed FA-JTR-IM scheme in terms of error performance over its conventional benchmark schemes under the same SE condition.