Entropy Coding Aided Adaptive Subcarrier-Index Modulated OFDM

We propose entropy coding-aided adaptive subcarrier-index-modulated orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (SIM-OFDM). In conventional SIM-OFDM, the indices of the subcarriers activated are capable of conveying extra information. We propose the novel concept of compressing the index information bits by employing the Huffman coding. The probabilities of the different subcarrier activation patterns are obtained from an optimization procedure, which improves the performance of the scheme. Both the maximum-likelihood as well as the logarithmic-likelihood ratio-based soft detector may be employed for detecting the subcarriers activated as well as the information mapped to the classic constellation symbols. As an additional advantage of employing the variable-length Huffman codebook, all the legitimate subcarrier activation patterns may be employed, whereas the conventional SIM-OFDM is capable of using only a subset of the patterns. Our simulation results show that an improved performance is attainable by the proposed system.