Index Modulation Aided Subcarrier Mapping for Dual-Hop OFDM Relaying

There is a recent surge of research interest in the study of performance-enhancing techniques for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based relay systems. Among those, subcarrier mapping has been verified to be an effective one for boosting the system capacity and improving the error performance. However, it has to be performed at the relay, which subsequently conveys the subcarrier permutation information to the destination. The existing signaling scheme occupies a portion of subcarriers to this end, leading to a loss of spectral efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel signaling scheme to eliminate this overhead by transferring the subcarrier permutation to the mode permutation that can be implicitly conveyed without consuming additional spectrum resources. We adopt phase rotation for mode design considering both non-adaptive and adaptive modulation, and illustrate the proposed scheme by taking the dual-hop OFDM relaying with semi-blind amplify-and-forward protocol as an example. An asymptotically tight upper bound on the bit error rate (BER) of the proposed scheme is derived in closed-form over Rayleigh fading channels. BER simulation results validate the analysis and show that the proposed scheme asymptotically approaches the ideal case that assumes perfect knowledge of subcarrier permutation information at the destination and significantly outperforms the existing scheme in the asymptotic signal-to-noise ratio region at the same spectral efficiency.