Index Modulated Affine Frequency Division Multiplexing With Spread Spectrum

Abstract: The recently proposed affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) is a new transmission waveform that has shown excellent performance in high-mobility environments, making it a sensible option for the next-generation wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate an energy-efficient index modulation scheme for AFDM by leveraging spread spectrum, referred to as IM-AFDM-SS, to combat the interference caused by the doubly dispersive channels. Specifically, the information bits are conveyed by the transmitted symbols as well as the indices of the selected spreading codes in our proposed IM-AFDM-SS scheme. To avoid extensive computations, we also develop a lowcomplexity maximal ratio combining (MRC) detector algorithm, which recovers the spreading codes first and demodulates the symbols afterwards. Moreover, an upper bound on the bit error rate (BER) of the proposed IM-AFDM-SS system with maximumlikelihood (ML) detection is derived. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed IM-AFDM-SS system over the classical AFDM spread spectrum (AFDM-SS) and the existing index modulated AFDM (IM-AFDM) systems.