Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation

In this paper, a novel orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme, which is called OFDM with index modulation (OFDM-IM), is proposed for frequency-selective fading channels. In this scheme, inspiring from the recently introduced spatial modulation concept for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, the information is conveyed not only by M-ary signal constellations as in classical OFDM, but also by the indices of the subcarriers, which are activated according to the incoming bit stream. Different transceiver structures are proposed and a theoretical error performance analysis is provided for the new scheme. It is shown via computer simulations that the proposed scheme achieves significantly better error performance than classical OFDM due to the information bits carried in the spatial domain by the indices of OFDM subcarriers.