The inspiration for this book arose from the desire to enlighten and instill a greater appreciation among wireless engineering society about a very promising technology for future wireless systems. Through this treatise, we aspire to expound the several benefits of space modulation techniques (SMTs) and demonstrate the several opportunities they convey. We believe that this book is also a unique tribute to the many scientists who were involved in the development of SMTs in the past 10 years.

SMT technology has come about from research that began 10 years ago and formed a basis for the work to be applied in what were then termed “beyond 4G” or B4G technologies before any consideration of what will be adopted within 5G networks. The attractiveness of the technology is that it enables the possibility to achieve comparable data throughput to a similar MIMO system yet with as few as just one radio transceiver at each end. Otherwise, in conventional MIMO, several transceivers would be required ranging anything from 4 to 128 in next generation communication systems, which would be costly and energy inefficient. Therefore, SMTs are now reaching a matured level that they are integrated in this book to assist the research and development community in learning about the concepts. The book identifies and discusses in detail a number of emerging techniques for high data rate wireless communication systems. The book serves also as a motivating source for further research and development activities in SMT. The limitations of current approaches and challenges of emerging concepts are discussed. Furthermore, new directions of research and development are identified, hopefully providing fresh ideas and influential research topics to the interested readers.

SMTs provide unique method to convey information bits and require innovative thinking, which goes beyond existing theories. The book provides a comprehensive overview on the basic working principle of coherent and noncoherent SMTs. Practical system models with the minimum number of needed RF‐chains at the transmitter are presented and discussed in terms of hardware cost, power efficiency, performance, and computational complexity. The advantages and disadvantages of each technique along with their detailed performance are discoursed. A general framework for analyzing the performance of these techniques is provided and used to provide detailed performance analysis over several generalized fading channels. In addition, capacity analysis of SMTs is provided and thoroughly discussed.