New Signal Constellation Pairs for the ZTM-OFDM-IM System

In this paper, we investigate new signal constellation pairs for mapping active subcarriers of the zero-padded trimode orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (ZTM-OFDM-IM) systems. In the presented system, one of a constellation pair is the same as the one used in the previous work, and the other is a constellation larger than the one used in the previous work. It increases the minimum Euclidean distance between the subblocks of the ZTM-OFDM-IM system with new constellation pairs under the constraint of the same spectral efficiency. Computer simulation in AWGN and frequency-selective fading channels shows that the new ZTM-OFDM-IM system has a much lower bit error rate than OFDM-IM and dual-mode OFDM-IM and slightly outperforms the system with conventional constellation pairs. Since the proposed constellation pairs prove the error performance improvement of the system, it is considered that a further study on generalized design of the constellation pair for the ZTM-OFDM-IM system is necessary in the future.