Exploiting Spatial Modulation for Strong PhaseNoise Mitigation in mmWave Massive MIMO

This letter investigates phase noise (PN) mitigation in generalized receiver spatial modulation (GRSM) massive MIMO systems at mmWave under a common local oscillator (CLO). Under CLO, the received energy remains invariant relative to the no-PN scenario, enabling reliable energy-based spatial detection using the no-PN threshold. PN-sensitivity and geometry-based metrics are introduced to design compact, PN-resilient MQAM symbol pools with low detection complexity. PN robustness is further improved through an enhanced PN-aware GRSM-MQAM system that exploits spatial modulation (SM) to recover part of the MQAM bits and strategically maps spatial-pattern Hamming weights to reduce the effective PN impact. In addition, a practical single-stage PN estimation/compensation architecture is proposed, while a benchmark double-stage compensation is adopted to quantify the upper bound achievable via separate Tx/Rx PN mitigation. Results show that under PN, the overall BER is mainly dominated by MQAM symbol detection errors, especially for denser constellations, whereas spatial detection remains robust. The proposed single-stage compensation improves PN resilience, while the benchmark double-stage compensation approaches near PN-free performance.