Low-Complexity Detection of Permutational Index Modulation for Noncoherent Communications

This letter presents a massive SIMO scheme for wireless communications with one-shot noncoherent detection. It is based on permutational index modulation over OFDM. Its core principle is to convey information on the ordering in which a fixed collection of values is mapped onto a set of OFDM subcarriers. A spherical code is obtained which provides improved robustness against channel impairments. A simple detector based on the sorting of quadratic metrics of data is proposed. By exploiting statistical channel state information and hardening, it reaches near-ML error performance with a low-complexity implementation.