In spatial modulation systems

the reliability of the active antenna detection is of vital importance since the modulated symbols tend to be correctly demodulated when the active antennas are accurately identified. 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 the conventional spatial modulation. As the minimum Hamming distance increases

the reliability of the active antenna detection is directly enhanced

which 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 counterpart. The optimal maximum likelihood detector is first formulated. Then

a low-complexity suboptimal detector is proposed to reduce the computational complexity. Theoretical derivations of the channel capacity and the bit error rate are presented in various channel scen

arios. 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.