OFDM with Index Modulation for UAV Communication Systems

In this paper, we investigate the transmission issue of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) communication systems using OFDM with index modulation, which is called OFDM-IM and the information is conveyed not only by M-ary signal constellations as in classical OFDM, but also by the indices of the activated subcarriers. We give the OFDM-IM framework and the transceiver model of the UAV communication system, investigate the system implementation scheme from several aspects such as index selection, LLR detection, channel estimation and equalization, etc. The performance of the spectrum efficiency, energy efficiency and bit error rate(BER) are analyzed according to different conditions and simulation parameters. It is shown that, due to the use of OFDM-IM, the UAV communication systems achieve higher spectral efficiency, higher energy efficiency and lower BER than those of classical OFDM when the signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) is greater than 11dB.