Subblocks set design aided orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with all index modulation

Abstract

In recent years, OFDM with index modulation (OFDM-IM) has become a potential technique due to its improvement of diversity gain. In typical OFDM-IM schemes, incoming information bits are divided into two parts, symbols bits, and index bits. However, the symbol bits conveyed by each OFDM symbol suffer from low diversity order, which has a negative impact on diversity gain. In this paper, we propose the scheme called OFDM with all index modulation (OFDM-AIM), which replaces the PSK/QAM constellation modulator with subblock modulator and simplifies the structure. With such an arrangement, the subblocks of OFDM-AIM become flexible, which contributes to achieving the higher diversity order of the system. Moreover, we study the effects of Euclidean distance and diversity order based on the unconditional pair error probability, which gives the guideline to design a legitimate subblocks set. Then the algorithm to build the subblocks set with higher diversity order is proposed, which can achieve better diversity gain. Theoretical and simulated results show that the OFDM-AIM scheme is capable of achieving better BER performance than other index modulated OFDM schemes.