Performance analysis of OFDM-IM scheme under STO and CFO

In this letter, performance analysis of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (OFDM-IM) is presented in term of bit error rate (BERs). The analysis considers its performance under two impairments, symbol time offset (STO) and carrier frequency offset (CFO) in frequency-selective fading channel. As orthogonal multicarrier system, OFDM-IM is subject to both inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-carrier interference (ICI) in a frequency-selective fading channel. OFDM-IM is a new multicarrier communication system, where the active subcarriers indices are used to carry additional bits of information. In general, in the previous existing works, OFDM-IM are evaluated only for near-ideal communication scenarios by only incorporating the CFO factor. In this work, the OFDM-IM performance is investigated and compared with conventional OFDM in the presence of two impairments, STO and CFO. Simulation results show that OFDM-IM outperforms the conventional OFDM with the presence of STO and CFO, especially at high SNR areas.