MCIK-NOMA: A novel index modulation based approach to improve spectral efficiency and error performance over generalized a - μ and k - μ fading channels with imperfect CSI

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme has emerged as a promising multiple access technology in future wireless communications as it provides massive connectivity than the existing orthogonal multiple access (OMA) methods. Index modulation (IM) permits additional information to be conveyed through the indices of active sub carriers along with the M-ary data symbols thereby increasing the spectral efficiency through selection diversity gain. The union of NOMA and IM called a novel multi-carrier index keying based non orthogonal multiple access (MCIK-NOMA) system is proposed in this paper and its performance is analyzed over generalized a -mu and k- mu fading environments. The impact of various fading factors such as non-linearity (a), ratio of powers (k) and number of multi-path clusters (mu) on the system performance is investigated and discussed through simulations. Furthermore, the error performance of Rayleigh, Weibull, Gamma, exponential and Nakagami-m fading environment is investigated by changing the fading parameters of generalized fading channels. The impact of perfect, fixed and variable channel state information (CSI) conditions on the proposed system is explored. Simulation results verify the theoretical expressions. The results demonstrate that the proposed MCIK-NOMA system outperforms the existing NOMA and OMA systems in terms of bit error rate (BER), spectral efficiency, and energy efficiency.