OFDM with hybrid number and index modulation

Abstract

A novel transmission scheme is introduced for efficient data transmission by conveying additional information bits through jointly changing the index and number of active subcarriers within each orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) subblock. The proposed scheme is different from the conventional OFDM-subcarrier number modulation (OFDM-SNM) and OFDM-index modulation (OFDM-IM), in which data bits are transmitted using either number or index of active subcarriers. The proposed modulation technique offers superior spectral and energy efficiency compared to its counterparts OFDM-SNM and OFDM-IM, especially at low modulation orders such as binary phase shift keying (BPSK) that can provide high reliability and low complexity, thus making it very suitable for meeting the requirements of Internet of things (IoT) applications. Bit error rate (BER) performance analysis is provided for the proposed scheme, and Monte Carlo simulations are presented to prove the consistency of the simulated BER with the analyzed one. More importantly, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme can offer much superior BER performance compared to that of OFDM-IM and classical OFDM under equivalent power and spectral efficiency values.