Spectral Efficiency Enhancement Based on Sparsely Indexed Modulation for Green Radio Communication

Jointly enhancing both energy efficiency (EE) and spectrum efficiency (SE) of modulation schemes becomes one of the main issues for 5G mobile communications. Recently, an indexed modulation (IM) technique provides an interesting tradeoff between EE and SE. Data can be conveyed through the combination of subcarriers pattern that can be divided between activated/non-activated subcarriers in the frequency domain. Maximum SE can be attained at half subcarrier activation, hence producing symbols with half energy of the conventional orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system. In this paper, alternatively, the new concept of sparsely indexing modulation (SIM) on overall subcarrier space is clarified. Sparse (few) subcarrier activations provide much higher EE, while the combinatorial indexing of the sparse subcarriers on the overall subcarriers as a single group spans huge combinatorial space that provides approximately the same SE of the plain OFDM system. The fallacy of indexing difficulty on overall subcarrier space without grouping is resolved. Moreover, a further SE improvement is suggested by introducing permutation-based indexing and combinatorial indexing on over-complete dictionaries. Sparsely indexing represents the cornerstone, which enables compressive sensing tools to enforce IM gains. Based on the conducted simulations, the proposed SIM scheme outperforms the conventional OFDM system in terms of the error performance, the peak-to-average power ratio, and the EE with the same spectral efficiency without channel coding complexity. The proposed SIM scheme is considered one of the energy saving-oriented modulations.