Dither Signal Design for PAPR Reduction in OFDM-IM over a Rayleigh Fading Channel

Abstract: Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (OFDM-IM) is a novel scheme where the information bits are conveyed through the subcarrier activation pattern (SAP) and the symbols on the active subcarriers. Unfortunately, OFDM-IM inherits the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem from the classical OFDM. The OFDMIM signal with high PAPR induces in-band distortion and out-of-band radiation when it passes through high power amplifier (HPA). There are attempts to reduce PAPR by adding dither signals in the idle subcarriers, where the dither signals can have various amplitude constraints according to the characteristic of the corresponding OFDM-IM subblock. But, there is no result for the specific amplitude constraint for the dither signals over a Rayleigh fading channel. In this letter, based on pairwise error probability (PEP) analysis, a specific constraint for the dither signals is derived over a Rayleigh fading channel.