Interference Analysis of QAM based Filter Bank Multicarrier System with Index Modulation

Abstract

Index modulation (IM) has recently emerged as a promising concept for spectrum and energy-efficient next generation wireless communications systems since it strikes a good balance among error performance, complexity, and spectral efficiency. IM technique when applied to a multicarrier waveforms yields the ability to convey the information not only by Mary signal constellations as in conventional multicarrier systems, but also by the indexes of the subcarriers, which are activated according to the incoming bit stream. Although IM is well studied for OFDM based systems, FBMC with index modulation has not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we shed light on the potential and implementation of IM technique for QAM based FBMC system. We start with a mathematical model of the IM based QAM-FBMC system (FBMC/QAM-IM) along with the derivation of interference terms at the receiver due to channel distortions and noise. The interference terms including the ones introduced by the multipath channel are analyzed in terms of MSE and output SINR. It is shown with analytical and simulation results that the interference power in FBMC/QAM-IM is smaller comparing to that of the conventional FBMC/QAM system as some of the subcarriers are inactive. The performance of FBMC/QAM with IM is investigated by comparing the SIR and output SINR with that of the conventional FBMC/QAM system along with the BER performance which shows that the FBMC/QAM-IM is a promising transmission technique for future wireless networks.