Filtered-OFDM with Index Modulation for Mixed Numerology Transmissions

Abstract

Mixed numerology transmission is proposed as a solution to support diverse services and requirements for next-generation wireless communication (5G) and beyond by assigning different numerology to different services. However, multiplexing different numerology in the frequency domain will destroy the orthogonality of the multicarrier system resulting in internu-merology interference (INI), which will severely deteriorate the system performance. In this paper, filtered-OFDM (f-OFDM) combined with index modulation is proposed as a solution to effectively mitigate the inter-numerology interference. In OFDM with index modulation, only a fraction of subcarriers is activated, so that information is conveyed through both subcarriers and indices of activated subcarriers. To exploit the diversity gain of index modulation in mixed numerology transmissions, filtering is also done on each numerology. Simulation results show that combining index modulation with f-OFDM can significantly improve the performance of the system in mixed numerology transmission scenarios.