Spatial Modulation Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Research Articles

Investigations on OFDM UAV-based free-space optical transmission system with scintillation mitigation for optical wireless communication-to-ground links in atmospheric turbulence

The potential integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with free space optical (FSO) communication systems stands as a promising innovation in the realm of wireless network infrastructures. This study presents a comprehensive investigation into the application of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in conjunction with UAV-based FSO technology, with a specific focus on establishing robust wireless communication links to ground sites within the evolving landscape of 5G networks. The research introduces a pioneering 4-level quadrature amplitude modulation (4-QAM)-OFDM-FSO framework tailored for UAV-to-ground communication, revolutionizing the prospects for seamless and high-throughput data transmission within dynamic network environments. Through comprehensive simulations and theoretical analyses, we unveil the system's efficacy in mitigating atmospheric turbulence, achieving heightened signal integrity, and ensuring performance adaptability over varying link distances, thus significantly addressing present limitations in traditional wireless communication models. Anchored within the context of modern wireless network infrastructures, this work serves as a crucial stepping stone for the practical application of OFDM-UAV-FSO communication systems, representing a paradigm shift in fostering resilient and agile wireless connectivity in the era of 5G networks. The inception of cutting-edge wireless networks expected to outperform the capabilities of 5G necessitates an infrastructure that can handle vast amounts of data. This infrastructure must be not only cost-effective and simple to deploy but also readily scalable to accommodate the diverse demands of front-haul and backhaul applications. Motivated by the growing interest in harnessing UAVs to extend the reach and enhance the operational efficacy of conventional cellular networks, this work introduces a novel application of UAV-ground station connections. The concept employs FSO to facilitate network traffic within both the segments. To optimize throughput, resilience, and spectral efficiency, the application of OFDM is proposed. The research considers the transmission of a 20 Gbps 4-QAM data signal across various channel conditions. It thoroughly assesses the performance implications of factors such as transmission distance and beam divergence. The study explores the correlation between pointing error, scintillation, beam divergence angle, and average spectral efficiency. A slight increase in pointing error results in a rapid rise in the scintillation index, while a larger beam divergence angle can help minimize the impact of scintillation. Adapting the beam's divergence angle based on the pointing error between the optical transceivers can reduce the effects of scintillation and improve the average spectral efficiency and channel capacity. Additionally, the relationship between pointing error, scintillation, and the determination of the optical beam divergence angle in terms of beam divergence and average spectral efficiency and channel capacity is examined, and theoretical evaluations further confirm the method's effectiveness in reducing scintillation in the presence of pointing errors. Furthermore, the simultaneous use of OFDM adaptive beam divergence control and modulation could significantly enhance the data rate. This approach aims to reduce the impact of scintillation in UAV FSO links, which often experience significant losses due to unpredictable fluctuations in the atmosphere's refractive index. The results of the simulations indicate that the integrated 4-QAM-OFDM-FSO framework can realize high data transmission rates, efficiently serving front-haul and backhaul needs, thereby signifying a significant evolutionary leap for the next generation of wireless technology. The numerical findings demonstrate the significant impact of the coherent FSO OFDM optical wireless communication (OWC) setup in UAV wireless communications to ground links, particularly in mitigating the effects of strong turbulence and pointing errors (PEs). Through the integration of spatial coherence diversity and adaptive modulation OFDM in the coherent OWC, there has been a noticeable enhancement in the average spectral efficiency (ASE). Notably, our results indicate an ASE of 53 bits/s/Hz and 37 bits/s/Hz achieved at an average transmitted optical power of 10 dBm for an aperture diameter of 10 cm, without and with PEs for the coherent OWC-FSO OFDM UAV technique, respectively. The proposed method was validated through simulations, demonstrating both improved average spectral efficiency and effective reduction of the scintillation effect. This approach holds promise for mitigating scintillation effects in UAV-FSO links.

A Survey on Spatial Modulation OFDM: Optimal Detection and Performance Analysis

Spatial modulation is a novel modulation scheme that aims to acquire a trade-off between the two adverse purposes in wireless communications, namely the improvements of data rate and data reliability, by adjusting the operational transmit antenna index in the emitted bits. To fight against inter-symbol interference (ISI) present in frequency selective channels, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) as become a extensively accepted and used mechanism. We investigate in this work the performance of SM-OFDM modulation over frequency selective MIMO channel using quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) scheme. At the receiver side, a group of detectors is proposed to recover the active transmit antenna index (Tx-antenna) and the emitted data sequence. In this paper, a new SM-OFDM-based scheme is proposed, which adds another element of information in the transmitted SM-data block consisting of a chosen constellation among the available rotated set. To attain this, an additional index is used to select the specific constellation. At the receiver, a set of detectors is proposed to jointly estimate the transmitted symbol, as well as the used constellation and the active transmit antenna indices. The comparison of the performance of this new scheme against the conventional SM-OFDM shows an increased spectral efficiency at the price of a slight degradation in bit error rate. The proposed scheme permits a trade-off between the quality of the communication and the achieved spectral efficiency. Some concluding remarks are drawn over simulation results.

Design of Offset Spatial Modulation OFDM

In this paper, the idea of offset spatial modulation (OSM) is integrated with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), toward an efficient design to bridge their advantages. Compared to its conventional counterpart as spatial modulation (SM)-OFDM, the proposed OSM-OFDM scheme aims at providing a simplified implementation structure with less number of radio frequency (RF) chains, by introducing an offset between the RF chain and the index of the activated transmit antenna on each subcarrier. Specifically, three types of offset antenna selection (OAS) methods are developed to meet different scene requirements for different number of available RF chains. Furthermore, through theoretical analysis, we quantify the bit error rate upper bounds of OSM-OFDM with different types of OAS methods. Finally, extensive computer simulations demonstrate that OSM-OFDM provides a flexible tradeoff among implementation cost, computation complexity and error performance.

Iterative Compensation for Clipping Noise in Spatial Modulation OFDM Systems

Clipping is an effective technique to adjust the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of spatial modulation (SM) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In this paper, an iterative soft compensation method is proposed for mitigating the effect of the clipping noise. In the proposed method, the sparsity and relativity of all transmit antennas are exploited, and the mean and power of the clipping noise are estimated based on the a priori information. Furthermore, the attenuation factor in each iteration is updated to yield a more accurate system model. Simulation results show that the proposed method is capable of providing considerable bit error rate (BER) performance gains over conventional compensation methods for both balanced and unbalanced antenna configurations.

Efficient Detection of Spatial Modulation OFDM Systems With Multiple Carrier Frequency Offsets

In this letter, an efficient detection scheme is proposed to mitigate the effect of the carrier frequency offset (CFO) in spatial modulation orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (SM-OFDM) systems. Specifically, the proposed scheme employs a novel symbol-by-symbol-aided iterative detector to the SM-OFDM systems with multiple CFOs, where the zero symbols are considered as constellation points. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is capable of effectively mitigating the effect of multiple CFOs and of providing about considerable system performance improvement compared with the conventional parallel interference cancellation-aided maximum likelihood detector at a moderate complexity cost.

Pilot Symbol Aided Channel Estimation for Spatial Modulation-OFDM Systems and its Performance Analysis with Different Types of Interpolations

Spatial modulation orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (SM-OFDM) system has been recently proposed as an alternative for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-OFDM systems to increase spectral efficiency by keeping a low-complexity implementation. In the literature, SM-OFDM systems assume a perfect channel state information (P-CSI) available at the receiver for coherent detection and the channel estimation problem is not considered. It is clear that the channel estimation is a critical issue on the performance of SM-OFDM systems. In this paper, a frame structure where pilot symbols are typically interspersed with data symbols among the sub-carriers to aid the channel estimation is considered. Then the pilot symbol aided channel estimation (PSA-CE) technique with different interpolations is proposed for the SM-OFDM systems. It is shown that in the proposed PSA-CE, equidistantly spaced pilot symbols allow to reconstruct the channel response by means of interpolation if the spacing of the pilots is sufficiently close to satisfy the sampling theorem. Linear, nearest neighbor, piecewise cubic Hermite and the low-pass interpolations are investigated to explore trade-off between complexity and performances. We show that the low pass interpolator yields better performance than the other interpolation techniques for selected cases such as higher order modulations. The results validate the potential of the proposed PSA-CE estimation applying to SM-OFDM systems.