Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a well-established technique in wired and wireless communications due to its high spectral efficiency compared to other multicarrier transmission schemes. However, the explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) has demanded a more spectrally-efficient technique to utilize small bandwidths, on which numerous low-power low-rate devices operate. This thesis aims to provide solutions for this problem.
First, the integration of index modulation to fast-OFDM, which is a special variant of OFDM, is investigated. The highest obtainable bit rate of this system is derived, which demonstrates enhancements compared to OFDM systems in the low-power low-rate regions. Furthermore, an improved one-dimension constellation is found to optimize the overall bit error rate (BER) of this system. Numerical results show that the proposed system exhibits enhancements in both bit rate and error performance, leading to higher spectral efficiency compared to OFDM in the low-power regions.
The second part of the thesis is concerned with reducing the bandwidth consumed by multicarrier transmissions. This results in the mutual orthogonality among subchannels being relaxed, yielding a Non-orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (NFDM) system. The main contribution in this part includes a novel and feasible design for NFDM systems, which is capable of eliminating inter-channel interference (ICI), which is the major limitation of the conventional NFDM system. Because ICI is completely eliminated, the BER performance of the proposed system is the same as that of an OFDM system over additive white Gaussian noise channels. The power spectrum density (PSD) of the proposed system is also investigated, leading to design guidelines and tradeoffs between the PSD shape and the system's bit rate.
Finally, index modulation is incorporated in the proposed NFDM systems. Thanks to our ICI-free design of NFDM, this combined system (NFDM-IM) and fast-OFDM-IM share a similar simple two-stage signal detection mechanism. Improved QAM constellations are found for NFDM-IM systems to optimize their overall BER. Obtained results show that with low modulation orders such as 8-QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation), NFDM-IM systems employing the improved constellation achieve BER performance close to that of NFDM in the low BER regions. With equivalent occupied bandwidth and error performance, an NFDM-IM system with optimal 8-QAM constellation produces better spectral efficiency
than the one using the conventional hexagonal constellation
