Index and Composition Modulation

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel modulation concept which we call \emph{index and composition modulation (ICM)}. In the proposed concept, we use indices of active/deactive codeword elements and compositions of an integer to encode information. In this regard, we first determine the activated codeword elements, then we exploit energy levels of these elements to identify the compositions. We depict a practical scheme for using ICM with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and show that OFDM with ICM (OFDM-ICM) can enhance the spectral efficiency (SE) and error performance of OFDM-IM. We design an efficient low-complexity detector for the proposed technique. Moreover, we analyze the error and SE performance of the OFDM-ICM technique and show that it is capable of outperforming existing OFDM benchmarks in terms of error and SE performance.