Energy-Efficient Index Modulation With In-Phase/Quadrature Format in the Generalized Fading Channel

Dual-mode (DM) or multi-mode (MM) index modulation (IM) techniques with the in-phase/quadrature (IQ) format have been investigated for improving the performance of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with IM (OFDM-IM) system in the frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel. However, all subcarriers in these schemes must be activated so that the energy efficiency (EE) of the system inevitably decreases. In this paper, we propose a novel modulation scheme named quadrature tri-mode index modulation (QTM-IM) technique to achieve a trade-off between the spectral efficiency (SE) and EE. The proposed QTM-IM can also be flexibly extended into multi-mode form called MM with enhanced IQ (MM-EIQ). The multi-mode
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-ary pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) constellations containing the origin point are designed to map the information bits into the active subcarriers. On the other hand, the theoretical analysis of IM-based schemes over the Rician fading channel has been conducted since most previous papers only considered the Rayleigh fading channel. At the receiver, three kinds of detectors with different algorithm complexities are employed for signal demodulation. Finally, the computer simulation results demonstrate the enhancement of the proposed schemes. More specially, (i) QTM-IM achieves 4dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain at the BER level of 10
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compared with quadrature DM (QDM) scheme with the same SE in the Rician fading channel and (ii) MM-EIQ harvests 0.89 bits/s/Hz SE gain and almost doubles the EE compared with MM-IQ scheme without any SNR loss over the Rayleigh fading channel.