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fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LCOMM.2017.2690418, IEEE
Communications Letters
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. XX, NO. XX, XXX 201*
Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Reduction in OFDM
Index Modulation Through Convex Programming
Jianping Zheng, Hongmei Lv
Abstract—Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFD-
M) index modulation (IM) is a new multi-carrier modulation
where the sub-carriers have two states, active and idle, and the
indices of the active sub-carriers carry information. Although
showing many advantages over OFDM, OFDM-IM also inherits
the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem. In this
letter, utilizing the signal feature of OFDM-IM, a high-efficient
PAPR reduction method is proposed. Concretely, a small dither
in the idle sub-carrier is introduced to reduce the PAPR, and the
design of the optimal dither signal can be solved by the convex
programming. Simulation results show that the proposed method
can achieve a large PAPR reduction when a proper amplitude
constraint on the dither signal is employed.
Index Terms—OFDM, peak-to-average power ratio, index
modulation, convex optimization
I. I NTRODUCTION
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) index
modualiton (IM) [1]-[3] is a new multi-carrier modulation,
where the sub-carriers have two states, active and idle, and the
indices of the active sub-carriers carry information. OFDM-
IM has its root in the spatial modulation [4]-[7] which is
a multiple-antenna multiplexing technique. The basic idea
behind OFDM-IM and SM is that only part of the resources
are activated and the activation pattern conveys information.
By shifting part information from signal constellation to
the activation pattern, OFDM-IM and SM can show some
advantages in some special scenarios. For example, OFDM-
IM shows stronger robustness to the inter-carrier interference
in the rapidly time-varying channel and better bit error rate
(BER) performance in the low-to-medium data rate than the
conventional OFDM [3]. For the recent research progress, the
reader is referred to [8][9] and the references therein.
As pointed out in [9], OFDM-IM inherits the high peak-to-
average power ratio (PAPR) problem from OFDM. As well
known, high PAPR can cause signal nonlinear distortion and
result in a decline in the whole system performance seriously.
Numerous PAPR reduction methods have been reported in the
OFDM literature, for a recent survey, see [10]. To address
the high PAPR problem in OFDM-IM, a way is to borrow the
methods designed for OFDM directly. However, those methods
may be not very efficient, since they do not take the unique
signal character of index modulation into account.
Here, we first study the direct extension of the active con-
stellation extension (ACE) method [11] designed for OFDM
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China under Grant 61671340, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the
Central Universities (JB160113).
The authors are with State Key Lab. of ISN, Xidian University, Xian,
710071, Shaanxi, P. R. China. Email: jpzheng@xidian.edu.cn
1089-7798 (c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1
in OFDM-IM, and then propose an efficient PAPR reduction
method through utilizing the idle sub-carrier. Concretely, in
the proposed method, a dither signal is introduced in the idle
sub-carrier, and no signal extension is required in the active
sub-carrier. The main contributions of this paper are 1) To the
best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first PAPR
reduction method utilizing the signal character of OFDM-IM.
2) The design of the optimal dither signal can be solved by
the convex programming. 3) Simulation results show that the
proposed method is very efficient and can achieve much better
PAPR performance than the ACE method.
N otations: Signals in time domain and frequency domain
are denoted by lower-case and capital letter, respectively. The
superscripts T and H denote the transpose and Hermitian
transpose of a vector or matrix, respectively. Furthermore,
∥•∥p denotes the p-norm, diag{v} denotes the diagonal matrix
formed by taking the elements of v as diagonal elements se-
quentially, C denotes the complex-number domain, CN (0, σ 2 )
denotes a zero-mean complex Gaussian random variable with
variance σ 2 , C(n, k) denotes the binomial coefficient, ⌊·⌋
denotes the maximum integer no larger than the argument,
and E[·] denotes the expectation of the random argument.
II. S IGNAL M ODEL
In OFDM-IM, the N sub-carriers in one OFDM symbol are
divided into g blocks each with n sub-carriers, and the corre-
sponding length-m information bit sequence is partitioned into
g blocks each with p bits, i.e., N = ng and m = pg. In each
block, only k out of n sub-carriers are activated to transmit
signals, and the other n − k sub-carriers remain idle. The first
p1 bits of the incoming p-bit sequence are used to determine
the indices of the k activated sub-carriers and remaining p2
(p2 = p − p1 ) bits are mapped into the k M -ary amplitude
phase modulation (APM) constellation symbols. Thus, it has
p1 = ⌊log2 (C(n, k))⌋, p2 = klog2 M , and the information rate
is η = m/N = (⌊log2 (C(n, k))⌋ + klog2 M )/n bits/s/Hz.
Denote the set of the indices of the k active sub-carriers in
the β-th, β = 1, 2, ...., g block as
Iβ = {iβ,1 , iβ,2 , ...., iβ,k } (1)
with iβ,γ ∈ {1, 2, ...., n} , γ = 1, 2, ...., k. Correspondingly, the
set of k APM symbols is denoted by
Sβ = {sβ,1 , sβ,2 , ....., sβ,k } (2)
where sβ,γ ∈S, γ=1, 2, ...., k and S is the APM constellation.
[ signal
Here, the ] constellation is assumed to be normalized,
2
i.e., E |sβ,γ | = 1. Then, the frequency-domain (FD) signal
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Communications Letters

IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. XX, NO. XX, XXX 201* 2

in this block can be expressed by signal in the α-th subcarrier is Xα . In fact, x+d is the actual
TD transmit signal after PAPR processing.
∑
k
Xβ = sβ,γ eiβ,γ (3) Note that Xα and any point in SE (Xα ) carry the same
γ=1 information. The rule of the feasible extension set design is
that the Euclidean distance of any two points carrying different
where eiβ,γ is the length-n all-zero vector except a one in information should not be decreased. Therefore, the corner
position iβ,γ . Concatenating the g blocks, the FD signal in point has the largest feasible extension region. While the inner
one OFDM symbol can be expressed by point, if exists, has the feasible extension region consisting of
( )T only zero-point, i.e, it is not extendable.
X = XT1 , XT2 , ..., XTg (4) To solve (8), several iterative approaches based on TD signal
The FD signal X is further transformed into the time-domain clipping and FD signal extension have been proposed, e.g.,
(TD) signal by projection onto convex sets method, approximate gradient-
1 project method, and smart gradient-project method [11].
x = √ FH X (5)
K
1.5

Here, K = kg is the numeber of active sub-carriers in

1

one OFDM symbol, and F is the discrete Fourier transform

0.5

(DFT) matrix given √ by F (k1 , k2 ) = exp (−j2πk1 k2 /N ), k1 , proposed method

k2 =1,...,N , with j = −1 being the imaginary unit. And the
0

1.5

PAPR is defined by 1
-0.5

-1

0.5
2
max |xi | 2
∥x∥∞
-1.5
-1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5
i=1,...,N 0

PAPR {x} = [ ] = [ ]/ (6) 1.5

2 2 -0.5

E |xi | E ∥x∥2 N -1
1

0.5
-1.5
After adding a length-L cyclic prefix (CP), the signal is -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5

transmitted over a linear time-invariant frequency selective -0.5

fading channel. At the receiver, after removing CP and per- ACE method
-1

forming the DFT, the equivalent FD receive signal can be -1.5

-1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5
expressed by
Fig. 1. The super constellation when 16-QAM is employed in the active
Yα = Xα Hα + Wα , α = 1, 2, ..., N (7) sub-carrier. Left: before the PAPR processing; Right: after processing by
the ACE method (lower right) and the proposed method (upper right). The
where Xα is the α-th element of X and Wα ∈ CN (0, N0,F ) notations ‘*’ and ‘o’ denote the signal points in the active and idle sub-carriers,
is the FD noise in the α-th subcarrier. The FD fading chan- respectively. The shadow region is the feasible extension region of the signal
T point associated with it.
nel vector is H = (H1 , H2 , ..., HN ) = Fh, where h =
T
(h1 , h2 , ..., hV , 0, ..., 0) ∈ C with h1 , h2 , ..., hV being the
N
B. Direct Extension of ACE to OFDM-IM
V channel taps. Finally, the transmit signal can be recovered
by the block maximum-likelihood (ML) detection [3], which In OFDM, the FD signal over each subcarrier belongs to a
can be expressed by conventional APM constellation. While in OFDM-IM, the idle
subcarrier transmits nothing. Define the union of the conven-
2
X̂β = arg min ∥Yβ − diag {Xβ } Hβ ∥ , β = 1, 2, ..., g (8) tional APM signal set and {0} as the super constellation. Then,
Xβ
the point ‘0’ becomes an inner point of this super constellation.
( )T With these preliminaries, the ACE method can be applied
with Yβ = Y(β−1)n+1 , ..., Yβn and Hβ =
( )T directly to OFDM-IM.
H(β−1)n+1 , ..., Hβn .
Fig. 1 gives the super constellation when 16-QAM is
III. PAPR R EDUCTION employed in the active sub-carrier. The left is the initial super
A. ACE for OFDM constellation, and the lower right is the super constellation
after ACE. From this figure, after ACE, first, no signal is
In OFDM, the ACE method [11] reduces peak power by
transmitted in the idle sub-carrier, i.e., the idle sub-carrier
inserting signals, i.e., the optimization objective is simplified
still remains idle. Second, the signal point in the active sub-
from the fraction to only the numerator in (6). And the PAPR
carrier can move to any point in its feasible extendable region.
reduction problem can be reformulated by
In other words, the PAPR reduction is realized only through
2
min ∥x + d∥∞ moving the FD signal in the active sub-carrier.
d
s.t. D = Fd (9)
C. Proposed Method
Dα ∈ SE (Xα ) , α = 1, ..., N
In this sub-section, we develop a new PAPR reduction
where d = (d1 , ..., dN )T is the N -dimensional insertion signal, method through utilizing only the idle sub-carrier. Concretely,
D = (D1 , ..., DN )T is the corresponding FD representation of a dither signal is added in the idle sub-carriers while the signal
d, and SE (Xα ) is the feasible extension region when the FD in the active sub-carrier is unchanged.

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Communications Letters

IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. XX, NO. XX, XXX 201* 3

ζ ′ 1 = (ζ ′ 1 , ..., ζ ′ n ) . The conditional PEP is computed by

T
Denote the union of the active index sets of all g blocks as
( )
∪
g P X1 → X̂1 |H1 , Y1 , w/ PAPR Processing
( { } 2 )
I= Iβ (10) 2
β=1 = P Y1 −diag X̂1 H1 ≤ ∥Y1 −diag {X1 } H1 ∥
( { } 2

Obviously, the size of I is K. Denote the complementary set = P diag X1 − X̂1 H1 +diag {ζ ′ 1 } H1 +W1
as Ī = {1, 2, ..., N }\I with size N1 = N −K. It is easy to see )
≤ ∥diag {ζ ′ 1 } H1 +W1 ∥
2
that Ī is the set of the indices of idle sub-carriers. Furthermore,
denote the FD dither vector by ζ ′ = (ζ ′ 1 , ζ ′ 2 , ..., ζ ′ N ) with (14)
T
′ where the second equality from the fact that Y1 =
ζα = 0 for α ∈ I.
Then, in the proposed method, the PAPR optimization diag {X1 + ζ ′ 1 } H1 + W1 .
problem can be presented by The error fashions of X1→ X̂1 can be partitioned into two
classes. The first is that X1 and X̂1 have the same active
H sub-carriers while different APM symbols. The second is that
min F (X + ζ ′ ) 2
′ ∞ X1 and X̂1 have different active sub-carriers. From Fig. 1, it
ζ (11)
s.t. ∥ζ ′ ∥∞ ≤ R is obvious that when R is large, the idle sub-carrier is more
possible to be decided to be the active one, and vice versa.
where the last inequality is introduced to limit the amplitude Thus, here, only the first error fashion is considered when R
of the dither signal and R is the upper bound selected. The is small, while only the second is considered with large R.
motivation of this amplitude constraint is to control the impact 1) R is small. Since the first error fashion happens in this
of the dither signal on the error performance. case, it has X̂α ̸= 0 if Xα ̸= 0 and X̂α = 0 if Xα = 0 for
Denote ζ as the N1 -dimensional dither vector shorted from α = 1, 2, ..., n. Furthermore, it has ζα′ = 0 if Xα ̸= 0, α =
ζ ′ by deleting the K zero elements. Then, (11) can be 1, 2, ..., n according to the rule of introducing dither signal in
represented by the proposed method. This means that ζ1′ is orthogonal with
2 X1 − X̂1 . Then, (14) can be further computed by
min FH Ī
ζ + x ∞
ζ (12) ( { } 2
s.t. ∥ζ∥∞ ≤ R
P diag X1 − X̂1 H1 +diag {ζ ′ 1 } H1 +W1
)
where x =FH X is the initial TD transmit signal and FĪ ∈ ≤ ∥diag {ζ ′ 1 } H1 +W1 ∥
2

CN ×N1 is obtained from F by deleting the columns whose ( { } 2 ) (15)

2
indices belong to I . To solve the convex optimization problem = P diag X1 − X̂1 H1 +W1 ≤ ∥W1 ∥
(12) we used CVX, a package for specifying and solving ( )
convex programs [13][14]. = P X1 → X̂1 |H1 , Y1 , w/o PAPR Processing
The super constellation after the proposed PAPR processing Therefore, the conditional PEP is the same in both the cases
is also shown in Fig. 1. Obviously, the signal in the active sub- with and without the PAPR processing when R is small.
carrier keeps fixed, while the signal in the idle subcarrier can 2) R is large. In this case, the additional interference
be moved around zero-point with an amplitude constraint. diag {ζ ′ 1 } H1 is not orthogonal with X1 and X̂1 in general
and independent of the noise W1 . Consider the very high
D. Impact of Dither Signal on Error Performance
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region where the noise term W1
To end this section, we analyze briefly the impact of the can be neglected. The interference term will dominate the error
dither signal on the error performance. First, it is easy to see performance. Therefore, the conditional PEP will increase
that the average transmit power per block is increased from k after the proposed PAPR processing when R is large, and an
to k + (n − k)R2 at most. Thus the transmit power loss can error floor can be found in high SNR regions due to the data-
be upper bounded by dependent interference.
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
2
( 2
)
η ≤ 10log10 k+(n−k)R = 10log10 1 + (n−k)R In this section, the performance of the proposed PAPR
( k
2
) 2
k
(13) method is verified by the computer simulation. The exponen-
= ln1010 ln 1 + (n−k)R
k ≈ 10(n−k)R
k ln 10 dB tial power-delay profile with σv2 ∝ exp (− (v − 1) /V ) , v =
1, ..., V and independent identically distributed (i.i.d.)
where the last approximation is from ln (1 + z) ≈ z for any Rayleigh fading are assumed. The channel parameters are
small positive value z. Considering the practical implementa- V =L=15, N =128. The OFDM-IM scheme parameters are
tion of OFDM-IM, it usually has n − k ≈ k. Therefore, the n=4, k=2, M =4 or 16. The abscissa is the SNR per bit in
power loss is bounded by η ≤ 4.35R2 dB, which is very small the TD defined as SNR=Eb /N0,T , where Eb =(N+L)/m is
when R is selected properly. the average energy per bit, and N0,T = N N0,F /K is the
Second, the impact on the conditional pair-wise error noise variance in the TD. The ordinate is the complementary
probability (PEP) is analyzed. Consider the case that X1 is cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of the PAPR, defined
erroneously decided to be X̂1 in the first signal block. Define by CCDF (γ) = Prob (PAPR > γ).

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LCOMM.2017.2690418, IEEE
Communications Letters

IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. XX, NO. XX, XXX 201* 4

0 0
10 10
Original Original here. From this figure, first, in the case of linear power
R=0.3 R=0.15
R=0.4 R=0.2 amplifier, the proposed method with R=0.15 and 0.2 has only
R=0.5 R=0.25 slight BER performance loss compared with ACE and original
R=0.6 SLM U=8
−1
10 SLM U=8 10
−1
SLM U=16 methods. With further increasing of R (R=0.25), the BER
ACE
SLM U=16 performance loss of the proposed method become larger. This
CCDF

ACE

CCDF
can be interpreted by the fact that larger R will result in smaller
−2 −2
minimum distance of the super constellation from Fig. 1.
10 10
Second, with nonlinear power amplifier, the proposed method
with R=0.15 and 0.2 shows better performance than ACE
and original methods. This means that the BER performance
−3 −3
10
2 4 6 8 10 12
10
2 4 6 8 10 12 degradation is more severe in the ACE and original methods
PAPR(dB) PAPR(dB)
than that in the proposed method. This is in accordance with
Fig. 2. The CCDF curves of the proposed method when QPSK(left) and the observation that, from the right sub-figure of Fig. 2, the
16-QAM(right) are employed. CCDF of PAPR larger than 5dB is larger in ACE and original
10
0
methods than that in the proposed method.

V. C ONCLUSION
−1
10
In this letter, we propose a PAPR reduction method for
OFDM-IM. By utilizing the free degree provided by the idle
10
−2
sub-carrier, the PAPR can be reduced enormously. Concretely,
Original, Linear
the PAPR reduction is achieved by only adding a dither signal
BER

R=0.15, Linear

10
−3
R=0.20, Linear
R=0.25, Linear
ACE, Linear
Original ,SSPA
R=0.15 ,SSPA
10
−4
R=0.20 ,SSPA
R=0.25 ,SSPA
ACE ,SSPA
−5
10
0 5 10 15 20
SNR(dB)
Fig. 3. The BER curves in both the cases with linear and nonlinear power
amplifiers. SSPA with IBO=5 dB is used and 16-QAM is employed.
Fig. 2 plots the CCDF curves of the proposed method,
the ACE method, the selected mapping (SLM) method [15]
with U=8 and 16 candidate vectors, and original method
(without PAPR reduction processing) when quadrature phase
shift keying (QPSK) and 16-QAM are employed in the active
sub-carrier. From this figure, the proposed method is very
efficient and can achieve much better PAPR performance than
ACE and SLM. And the larger R, the better PAPR. On the
other hand, it is interesting to find that, recalling that ACE
method usually attains more than 3 dB PAPR reduction in
OFDM [11], the achievable PAPR reduction by the ACE
method is smaller in OFDM-IM, e.g., it is only 1.5 dB in the
left sub-figure of Fig. 1. This phenomenon can be interpreted
as follows. In OFDM, all N sub-carriers carry non-zero
constellation symbols. However, in OFDM-IM, only the K
active sub-carriers carry non-zero constellation symbols. With
direction extension of ACE to OFDM-IM, as shown in Section
III-B, the idle N − K sub-carriers do not take part in the
ACE procedure. In other words, when the ACE is performed,
there are N free-degrees (variables) in OFDM while only K
free-degrees in OFDM-IM. Therefore, with ACE, the PAPR
reduction is smaller in OFDM-IM than that in OFDM.
Fig. 3 gives the BER performance of the proposed method in
both the cases with linear and nonlinear power amplifiers. 16-
QAM modulation is employed in the active sub-carrier. The
solid sate power amplifier (SSPA) [16] with input back-off
(IBO) of 5 dB is taken to model the nonlinear power amplifier
in the idle sub-carrier, and the optimization of the dither signal
can be solved by the convex programming.
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