What is index modulation (IM)? This is an interesting question that we have started to hear more and more frequently over the past few years. The aim of this paper is to answer this question in a comprehensive manner by covering not only the basic principles and emerging variants of IM, but also reviewing the most recent as well as promising advances in this field toward the application scenarios foreseen in next-generation wireless networks. More specifically, we investigate three forms of IM: spatial modulation, channel modulation and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with IM, which consider the transmit antennas of a multiple-input multiple-output system, the radio frequency mirrors (parasitic elements) mounted at a transmit antenna and the subcarriers of an OFDM system for IM techniques, respectively. We present the up-to-date advances in these three promising frontiers and discuss possible future research directions for IM-based schemes toward low-complexity, spectrum- and energy-efficient next-generation wireless networks.

Index Modulation Techniques for Next-Generation Wireless Networks

Spatial modulation (SM) is an innovative and promising digital modulation technology that strikes an appealing tradeoff between spectral efficiency and energy efficiency with a simple design philosophy. SM enjoys plenty of benefits and shows great potential to fulfill the requirements of future wireless communications. The key idea behind SM is to convey additional information typically through the ON/OFF states of transmit antennas and simultaneously save the implementation cost by reducing the number of radio-frequency chains. As a result, the SM concept can have widespread effects on diverse applications and can be applied in other signal domains, such as frequency/time/code/angle domain or even across multiple domains. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the latest results and progresses in SM research. Specifically, the fundamental principles, variants of system design, and enhancements of SM are described in detail. Furthermore, the integration of the SM family with other promising techniques, applications to emerging communication systems, and extensions to new signal domains are also extensively studied.

A Survey on Spatial Modulation in Emerging Wireless Systems: Research Progresses and Applications

A novel multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scheme, called space-time block coded spatial modulation (STBC-SM), is proposed. It combines spatial modulation (SM) and space-time block coding (STBC) to take advantage of the benefits of both while avoiding their drawbacks. In the STBCSM scheme, the transmitted information symbols are expanded not only to the space and time domains but also to the spatial (antenna) domain which corresponds to the on/off status of the transmit antennas available at the space domain, and therefore both core STBC and antenna indices carry information. A general technique is presented for the design of the STBC-SM scheme for any number of transmits antennas. Besides the high spectral efficiency advantage provided by the antenna domain, the proposed scheme is also optimized by deriving its diversity and coding gains to exploit the diversity advantage of STBC. A low-complexity maximum likelihood (ML) decoder is given for the new scheme which profits from the orthogonality of the core STBC. The performance advantages of the STBC-SM over simple SM and over V-BLAST are shown by simulation results for various spectral efficiencies and are supported by the derivation of a closed form expression for the union bound on the bit error probability.

Space-Time Block Coded Spatial Modulation

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (OFDM-IM) performs transmission by considering two modes over OFDM subcarriers, which are the null and the conventional $M$ -ary signal constellation The spectral efficiency (SE) of the system, however, is limited, since the null mode itself does not carry any information and the number of subcarrier activation patterns increases combinatorially In this paper, a novel IM scheme, called multiple-mode OFDM-IM (MM-OFDM-IM), is proposed for OFDM systems to improve the SE by conveying information through multiple distinguishable modes and their full permutations A practical and efficient mode selection strategy, which is constrained on the phase shift keying/quadrature amplitude modulation constellations, is designed Two efficient detectors that provide different tradeoffs between the error performance and detection complexity are also proposed The principle of MM-OFDM-IM is further extended to the in-phase and quadrature components of OFDM signals, and the method of generating multiple modes from the $M$ -ary pulse amplitude modulation constellation for this modified scheme is also introduced Bit error rate (BER) analyses are provided for the proposed schemes Monte Carlo simulations on BER corroborate the analyses and show that the proposed schemes appear as promising multi-carrier transmission alternatives by outperforming the existing OFDM-IM counterparts

Multiple-Mode Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing With Index Modulation

In fifth generation wireless networks, the escalating teletraffic and energy consumption has necessitated the development of green communication techniques in order to further enhance both the system’s spectral efficiency and energy efficiency In the past few years, the novel index modulation (IM) has emerged as a promising technology that is widely employed in wireless communications In this paper, we present a survey on IM in order to provide the readers with a better understanding of its principles, advantages, and potential applications We start with a comprehensive literature review, where the concept of IM is introduced, and various existing IM schemes are classified according to their signal domains, including the frequency domain, spatial domain, time domain and channel domain Then the principles of different IM-aided systems are detailed, where the transceiver design is illustrated, followed by descriptions of typical systems and corresponding performance evaluation A range of challenges and open issues on IM are discussed before we conclude this survey

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Novel Index Modulation Techniques: A Survey

Index modulation has become a promising technique in the context of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), whereby the specific activation of the frequency domain subcarriers is used for implicitly conveying extra information, hence improving the achievable throughput at a given bit error ratio (BER) performance. In this paper, a dual-mode OFDM technique (DM-OFDM) is proposed, which is combined with index modulation and enhances the attainable throughput of conventional index-modulation-based OFDM. In particular, the subcarriers are divided into several subblocks, and in each subblock, all the subcarriers are partitioned into two groups, modulated by a pair of distinguishable modem-mode constellations, respectively. Hence, the information bits are conveyed not only by the classic constellation symbols, but also implicitly by the specific activated subcarrier indices, representing the subcarriers’ constellation mode. At the receiver, a maximum likelihood (ML) detector and a reduced-complexity near optimal log-likelihood ratio-based detector are invoked for demodulation. The minimum distance between the different legitimate realizations of the OFDM subblocks is calculated for characterizing the performance of DM-OFDM. Then, the associated theoretical analysis based on the pairwise error probability is carried out for estimating the BER of DM-OFDM. Furthermore, the simulation results confirm that at a given throughput, DM-OFDM achieves a considerably better BER performance than other OFDM systems using index modulation, while imposing the same or lower computational complexity. The results also demonstrate that the performance of the proposed low-complexity detector is indistinguishable from that of the ML detector, provided that the system’s signal to noise ratio is sufficiently high.

Dual-Mode Index Modulation Aided OFDM

Dual-mode index modulation aided orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DM-OFDM) is recently proposed, where subcarriers are partitioned into OFDM subblocks, divided into two groups within each subblock, and modulated by two differentiable constellation alphabets. In DM-OFDM, additional bits can be transmitted through indices of subcarriers modulated by the same constellation alphabet. In this letter, generalized DM-OFDM (GDM-OFDM) is proposed, where the number of subcarriers modulated by the same constellation mode in each subblock is alterable. By applying such enhancements, the spectral efficiency can be improved at the cost of marginal performance loss. Moreover, since the bit error rate performance of GDM-OFDM degrades at low signal-to-noise ratios, an interleaving technique is employed to address this issue. At the receiver, a maximum-likelihood detector and a reduced-complexity log-likelihood ratio detector are employed for demodulation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed GDM-OFDM is capable of enhancing the spectral efficiency compared with DM-OFDM at the cost of negligible performance loss, and the interleaved GDM-OFDM can harvest on performance gain over GDM-OFDM.

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Generalized Dual-Mode Index Modulation Aided OFDM

Visible light communication (VLC) has become a promising complement to its radio-frequency (RF) counterpart. In VLC systems, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has drawn much attention due to its high data rate, simple equalization and robustness to the inter-symbol interference (ISI). In this paper, we present a comparative performance evaluation of several classical optical OFDM schemes, including DC-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM), asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM), pulse-amplitude-modulated discrete multitone (PAM-DMT), unipolar OFDM (U-OFDM) and Flip OFDM. Since DCO-OFDM suffers from energy efficiency loss due to addition of DC-bias, whilst ACO-OFDM, PAM-DMT and U-OFDM/Flip OFDM are spectrally inefficient due to their unique frame structures, the state-of-the-art energy- and spectrum- efficient optical OFDM schemes are investigated, including asymmetrically clipped DC-biased optical OFDM (ADO-OFDM), hybrid ACO-OFDM (HACO-OFDM), asymmetrically clipped absolute value optical OFDM (AAO-OFDM), the spectral and energy efficient OFDM (SEE-OFDM), layered ACO-OFDM (LACO-OFDM), enhanced U-OFDM (eU-OFDM), optical OFDM with index modulation (O-OFDM-IM) and optical dual-mode index modulation aided OFDM (DM-OFDM). In this paper, their principles are firstly illustrated, then performance comparisons are conducted for those optical OFDM schemes in terms of spectral efficiency, energy efficiency and computational complexity. Since light emitting diodes (LEDs) need to support both the illumination and communication simultaneously, dimming control should be considered in VLC systems. Therefore, dimmable optical OFDM for practical VLC systems incorporating illumination is also addressed.

Tianqi Mao

Papers

Dual-Mode Index Modulation Aided OFDM

Novel Index Modulation Techniques: A Survey

Generalized Dual-Mode Index Modulation Aided OFDM

Optical OFDM for visible light communications

Optical dual-mode index modulation aided OFDM for visible light communications