Adaptive OFDM Index Modulation for Two-Hop Relay-Assisted Networks

In this paper, we propose an adaptive orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) index modulation (IM) scheme for two-hop relay networks. In contrast to the traditional OFDM IM scheme with a deterministic and fixed mapping scheme, in this proposed adaptive OFDM IM scheme, the mapping schemes between a bit stream and indices of active subcarriers for the first and second hops are adaptively selected by a certain criterion. As a result, the active subcarriers for the same bit stream in the first and second hops can be varied in order to combat slow frequency-selective fading. In this way, the system reliability can be enhanced. Additionally, considering the fact that a relay device is normally a simple node, which may not always be able to perform mapping scheme selection due to limited processing capability, we also propose an alternative adaptive methodology in which the mapping scheme selection is only performed at the source and the relay will simply utilize the selected mapping scheme without changing it. The analyses of average outage probability, network capacity and symbol error rate (SER) are given in closed form for decode-and-forward (DF) relaying networks and are substantiated by numerical results generated by Monte Carlo simulations.