SC-FDMA with index modulation for M2M and IoT uplink applications

One of the most challenging issues of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is energy consumption. A massive deployment of connected devices is power hungry. Maximizing the energy efficiency of their batteries reduces the maintenance cost and extends their autonomy and then their utility. To address this issue, this paper proposes the introduction of index modulation on single carrier-frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) uplink transmissions for cellular IoT and machine-to-machine (M2M) networks. It is shown that the proposed SC-FDMA with index modulation (SC-FDMA-IM) scheme achieves 50% of energy efficiency increase, while improving the bit error rate performance by up to 3.5 dB of Eb/N0 for the same spectral efficiency performance. However peak-to average power ratio (PAPR) performance are decreased, and PAPR reduction techniques have to be used for this scheme.