Generalization of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing With Index Modulation

Recently, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with index modulation (OFDM-IM) was proposed. By selecting a fixed number of subcarriers as active subcarriers to carry constellation symbols, the indices of these active subcarriers may carry additional bits of information. In this paper, we propose two generalization schemes of OFDM-IM, named OFDM with generalized index modulation 1 (OFDM-GIM1) and OFDM-GIM2, respectively. In OFDM-GIM1, the number of active subcarriers in an OFDM subblock is no longer fixed. Dependent on the input binary string, different numbers of active subcarriers are assigned to carry constellation symbols. In OFDM-GIM2, independent index modulation is performed on the in-phase and quadrature component per subcarrier. Through such ways, a higher spectral efficiency than that of OFDM-IM may be achieved. Since both generalization schemes proposed suffer from BER performance loss in low SNR region, an interleaving technique is proposed to tackle this problem. Finally, noting that the two generalization schemes are compatible with each other, the combination of these two schemes, named OFDM-GIM3, has also been investigated. Computer simulation results clearly show our proposed scheme's superiority in both spectral efficiency and BER performance compared to existing works.