Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation in the presence of high mobility

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 the presence of high mobility. 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 low complexity transceiver structures based on maximum likelihood (ML) detection or log-likelihood ratio (LLR) calculation are proposed. It is shown via computer simulations that the proposed scheme achieves significantly better error performance than classical OFDM.