IM-OFDM ISAC Outperforms OFDM ISAC by Combining Multiple Sensing Observations

Index Modulated Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (IM-OFDM) based Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is potentially capable of outperforming Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) ISAC, since Index Modulation (IM) concentrates increased power on the activated subcarriers. This has been confirmed by authoritative publications for the IM-OFDM communication component. However, no evidence is found in the open literature that IM-OFDM sensing is capable of outperforming OFDM sensing, because the blank subcarriers impair the system's sensing functionality. The existing solutions either insert a radar signal into the deactivated subcarriers, thereby using a radar signal for sensing, or employ compressed sensing, which leads to a lower sensing performance than OFDM ISAC. Hence, a novel low complexity algorithm is proposed for ensuring that an IM-OFDM ISAC system outperforms its OFDM ISAC counterpart for both communication and sensing. The algorithm collects observations of the received signal to “fill in” the blank subcarriers in the sensing data created by IM-OFDM, whilst taking advantage of the increased subcarrier power attained by activating fewer subcarriers. This occurs over multiple transmit frames, which inevitably delays the target estimation. As OFDM sensing assumes low target velocities, this delay is shown to have a negligible impact on the sensing performance of IM-OFDM. The simulation results show that IM-OFDM ISAC is indeed capable of outperforming its OFDM ISAC counterpart for both sensing and communication. The impact of block interleaving and of the modulation type on the sensing performance is also discussed.