Cognitive Radio Network Assisted by OFDM With Index Modulation

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (OFDM-IM) transmits additional information bits through the indices of active subcarriers. In this paper, we explore the potential of an improvement of OFDM-IM by reusing inactive subcarriers to transmit signals for a secondary system. We consider a cognitive radio network assisted by OFDM-IM, where the primary user (PU) transmits its signal to the primary receiver, and the secondary user (SU) senses the idle spectrum and transmits its own signal to the secondary receiver via those idle subcarriers. By either combining the signal transmitted from SU or not, we propose two different detection strategies with different trade-offs between the computational complexity and system performance. An asymptotically tight upper bound on the bit error rate is derived to evaluate the error performance.