A low complexity detector with MRC diversity reception for MCIK-OFDM

Multi-carrier index keying (MCIK) is a recently developed transmission technique that exploits sub-carrier indices as an additional degree of freedom for data transmission. This paper investigates the performance of a low complexity detection scheme with diversity reception for MCIK with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed detection scheme, an exact and an approximate closed-form expression for the pairwise error probability (PEP) of greedy detector (GD) with maximal ratio combining (MRC) is derived. The presented results show that the performance of the GD is significantly improved when MRC diversity is employed. The proposed hybrid scheme is found to outperform maximum likelihood (ML) detection with a substantial reduction on the associated computational complexity.