Optimal Mapper for OFDM with Index Modulation: A Spectro-Computational Analysis

Abstract

In this work, we present an optimal mapper for OFDM with index modulation (OFDM-IM). By optimal we mean the mapper achieves the lowest possible asymptotic computational complexity (CC) when the spectral efficiency (SE) gain over OFDM maximizes. We propose the spectro-computational (SC) analysis to capture the trade-off between CC and SE and to demonstrate that an $N$-subcarrier OFDM-IM mapper must run in exact $\Theta(N)$ time complexity. We show that an OFDM-IM mapper running faster than such complexity cannot reach the maximal SE whereas one running slower nullifies the mapping throughput for arbitrarily large $N$. We demonstrate our theoretical findings by implementing an open-source library that supports all DSP steps to map/demap an N-subcarrier complex frequency-domain OFDM-IM symbol. Our implementation supports different index selector algorithms and is the first to enable the SE maximization while preserving the same time and space asymptotic complexities of the classic OFDM mapper.