A use-case efficient DFrFT-based index modulated-OFDM system in the presence of CFO

Abstract

Index modulated orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM-IM) only utilizes partial resources to transmit signals according to use case requirement, it leads to higher energy efficiency and spectral efficiency than the classical OFDM. However, in the presence of inter-carrier interference (ICI) due to carrier frequency offset (CFO), the performance of index modulated OFDM system severely deteriorates. To mitigate this issue, a novel discrete fractional Fourier transform (DFrFT) based OFDM-IM scheme over Rayleigh frequency selective fading channel is proposed in this paper. The optimum DFrFT angle (αopt) for this new scheme at various CFO values has been calculated theoretically. Incorporating these estimated αopt, the proposed system achieves a gain of 8 dB over conventional FFT-based OFDM-IM at bit error rate (BER) = 10−3 in a high normalized CFO (ϵ) environment (ϵ=0.2). The system model is also verified for different user applications, i.e., high data rate and low data rate applications. Simulation and analytical results show that the proposed model has a robust and superior performance compared to the conventional FFT-based OFDM-IM, DFrFT-based OFDM, and classical OFDM. Moreover, the proposed DFrFT-OFDM-IM model achieves all these superiorities with the same complexity as the conventional FFT-based OFDM-IM system.