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.2021.3089043, IEEE
Communications Letters
Index Modulated Spread Spectrum OFDM with
C-Transform
Hussein A. Leftah and Mohannad H. Al-Ali, Member, IEEE
Abstract—This paper proposes an orthogonal frequency divi-
sion multiplexing (OFDM) scheme that incorporates the index
modulation, spread spectrum, and C-transform techniques. The
developed OFDM selects a code from a known set to spread data
in frequency, uses the code’s index and M -ary symbols to send
information, and applies the C-transform to modulate subcarri-
ers. Computer simulations reveal that our OFDM outperforms
those of [1], [2] and achieves gains of about 15.6 dB and 15.5
dB when spectral efficiency is SE = 1 bps/Hz and 14.5 dB and
13 dB when SE = 1.5 bps/Hz at a bit error rate of 10−4 .
Index Terms—C-transform, index modulation, maximal ratio
combining, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, spread
spectrum.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Multi-carrier modulation is an important paradigm for
achieving higher spectral efficiency and reliable communi-
cations under unfavored channel situations [3]. Orthogonal
frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a multi-carrier
modulation that can offer high data rate at low hardware
complexity and simplified equalization [1]–[4]. OFDM has
profound success in different communication systems such as
long term evolution (LTE) and wireless fidelity (WiFi) [4].
Recently, the notion of index modulation (IM) has been
borrowed from spatial modulation in multiple-input multiple-
output (MIMO) antennas to subcarriers selection in OFDM
[1]. With IM, OFDM can gain more diversity order and
better energy saving than the conventional OFDM at the same
spectral efficiency (SE) [4]–[7]. Interestingly, IM introduces to
OFDM completely new dimensions for sending information in
addition to the regular amplitude or phase modulations.
The underlaying principle behind IM is to divide the total
information bits into blocks, each of which would assign part
of the bits for selecting an index of a transmission entity and
another for data modulation. Subcarrier IM activates a subset
of subcarriers from a given set and uses the index of that
subset for encoding information. The OFDM with subcarrier
IM (OFDM-SIM) [1] and precoded OFDM with subcarrier IM
(P-OFDM-SIM) [8] followed this sort of IM. The work of [9]
applied the concept of subcarrier IM separately on the real
and imaginary parts of an M -ary complex symbol.
Another variant for IM uses spread spectrum (SS) as a
transmission entity by choosing a spreading code out of the
available codes and exploiting the code’s index to map infor-
mation. This class of IM was initially appeared in [11], [12]
H. A. Leftah is with Basrah Engineering Technical College, Southern Tech-
nical University (STU), Basrah Province, Iraq. e-mail: (h.a.leftah@stu.edu.iq)
M. H. Al-Ali is with the Computer Engineering Department, University of
Basrah, Basrah Province, Iraq and also with the Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science Department, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211,
USA. (e-mail: mha6fd@missouri.edu; mohannad.khalaf@uobasrah.edu.iq)
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1
for single carrier modulation and time-domain spreading. For
multi-carrier, [2] proposed an index modulated OFDM scheme
with SS (IM-OFDM-SS) that selects a code from predefined
codes and spreads data symbols over the subcarriers. Similar to
[9], [10] considered using the IM based on SS independently
to the in-phase and quadrature components of the modulated
data. The recent work in [13] introduced joint IM over both
frequency and code domains (CF-IM-OFDM) to achieve more
saving in power consumption.
Most of the studies on index modulated OFDM employ
fast Fourier transform (FFT) for subcarrier modulation [1]–[4],
[7]–[10]. In contrast, [14] and [15] suggested using discrete
cosine transform (DCT) to improve SE. IM in these literatures
is similar to that in [1], [7]–[9] as it uses some subcarriers for
transmission while makes the others idle.
This paper takes a further step in investigating IM for
OFDM by regarding the C-transform presented in [16], [17]
rather than FFT. It performs IM at each block of data bits
and selects a spreading code from the available set. The C-
transform is an attractive candidate for OFDM with IM as
it can fortify OFDM by high SE, immunity to multipath
dispersion, and low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR).
The contributions of our work can be outlined as follows,
• We propose an OFDM system that uses IM, SS and
C-transform together to increase SE and harvest more
diversity order.
• We derive an analytic upper bound for the average bit
error probability (BEP) in Rayleigh fading channels and
investigate diversity and coding gains. Moreover, we
obtain an expression for the maximum PAPR.
• Our numerical results indicate that the proposed OFDM
shows better performance over OFDM-SIM and IM-
OFDM-SS. Specifically at a bit error rate (BER) of 10−4 ,
the achieved gains measured in energy-per-bit to noise
ratio (Eb /No ) over these benchmarks are, respectively,
15.6 dB and 15.5 dB for SE = 1 bps/Hz and 14.5 dB
and 13 dB for SE = 1.5 bps/Hz.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
depicts concisely the C-transform and its complexity. Section
III illustrates the transmit and receive sides of the proposed
OFDM scheme. Section IV obtains expressions for the average
BEP and the maximum PAPR. Section V provides numerical
results for the proposed system and related benchmarks and
Section VI concludes the paper.
Notation: Column vectors and matrices are denoted by bold
lower-case and upper-case letters. (·)T and (·)† are the real and
Hermitian transpose. diag(a) creates a diagonal matrix from
the elements of a and blkdiag([A1 , A2 , · · · ]) gives a block
diagonal matrix from A1 , A2 , · · · . Rn×m or Cn×m refers to
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Communications Letters
2

the real or complex space of n×m matrices. aR and aI are the TABLE I
real and imaginary parts of a.  is the circular convolution, C OMPUTATIONAL C OMPLEXITY OF THE C- TRANSFORM AND FFT FOR AN
N - SIZE COMPLEX INPUT VECTOR .
| · | is the absolute value for a scalar and k · k2 is the Euclidean
norm. P(A) is the probability of an event A and E [·] is the N
C-transform FFT
expectation operator. In is an n-size identity matrix. RA RM RO RA RM RO
128 1 926 1 926 3852 2 688 1 792 4 480
256 4 614 4 614 9 228 6 144 4 096 10 240
II. C-T RANSFORM 512 10 758 10 758 21 516 13 824 9 216 23 040
1024 24 582 24 582 49 164 30 720 20 480 51 200
A. Generation 2048 55 302 55 302 110 604 67 584 45 056 112 640
The C-transform for a frequency-domain signal vector of
length N can be regarded as a DCT preceded by Walsh-
Hadamard precoder (WHP). It is obtained using the subsequent For the purpose of comparison, FFT with radix-2 needs
procedure. Let W ∈ RN ×N and D ∈ RN ×N be the matrices complex multiplications (CM ) of N2 log2 N and complex ad-
of WHP and DCT. Given the rows of W and D, permute their ditions (CA ) of N log2 N . Since CM = 4RM + 2RA and
indexes following the bit-reversed-order (BRO) in that use a CA = 2RA , the total complexity of FFT in terms of real
binary sequence to represent each index, take the reverse of operations is given by
this sequence, and finally convert back the reversed binaries RM = 2N log2 N (5a)
to a decimal index [17]. Define P ∈ RN ×N as a permutation
RA = 3N log2 N. (5b)
matrix that would shuffle the rows of W and D according to
the BRO indexes. Table I shows RM , RA and the total number of real oper-
The C-transform matrix can be constructed from D, W and ations (RO ) for the C-transform and FFT assuming complex
P through [17] input vector of size N . It is obvious that the C-transform has
C = PDWT PT . (1) lower arithmetic operations than those for FFT.
The matrix C is real and unitary with C−1 = CT . Owing
to P, it exhibits a block diagonal structure in which C = III. P ROPOSED OFDM S YSTEM
blkdiag I2 , C2 , C4 , · · · , Clog2 (N ) , where Cx denotes a The transmit and receive structures of the proposed OFDM
 

C-transform matrix of x × x size such that x is a power of 2. system are depicted in Fig. 1. More details about them are
For illustration purposes, the P and C matrices have the given in the sequel.
following forms when N = 8,

1

0 0 0 0 0 0 0
 A. Transmit Side
0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 The proposed OFDM system divides the incoming infor-
0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
 
0

0 0 0 0 0 1 0
 mation bits pT into J blocks, each of which has pj bits,
P= , (2)
0
0
1 0 0 0 0 0 0
 j = 1, · · · , J. The pj bits are split further into two parts,
0 0 0 0 1 0 0
the first one is pj,1 and it is used to choose a spreading
 
0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
(j)
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
code si ∈ Cnj ×1 , i = 1, · · · , nj , from the columns of
C= ∆

1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

an orthogonal matrix S(j) = [s1 , · · · , snj ] ∈ Cnj ×nj . The
0 1
0 0

0
0.9239
0
0.3827
0
0
0
0
0
0
0 
0 
 dimension nj represents the number of subcarries that are
PJ
0 0

−0.3827 0.9239 0 0 0 0 

,
allocated for the j-th block such that j=1 nj = N , and
−0.0747
0 0 0 0 0.9061 0.3753 0.1802
N is the total number of subcarriers. We consider that pj,1


0 0 0 0 0.2126 0.7682 −0.5133 0.3182
satisfies the relation pj,1 = log2 nj [2]. The columns of S(j)
 
0 0 0 0 −0.3182 0.5133 0.7682 0.2126
−0.1802 −0.3753 −0.0747
0 0 0 0 0.9061
can be generated according to the Walsh codes [8], [18]. The
(3)
second part of bits is pj,2 and it is mapped to a real or complex
where (3) is computed as in (1) and W and D are the WHP symbol denoted here by a(j) that takes values from an M -ary
and DCT matrices when N = 8. data, where M is the same for all blocks. For the j-th block
(j)
in Fig. 1, the selected code si would spread the symbol a(j)
over nj subcarriers only.
B. Complexity
The output signal from the j-th spreader in Fig. 1 is
The block-diagonal structure of the matrix C defined in (1)
(j)
implies that two-third of its elements are zeros. Radix-2 fast x(j) = a(j) si , i ∈ {1, · · · , nj } . (6)
algorithm for the C-transform requires N2 (log2 N ) − (N − 1)
Let us concatenate signals from all the J spreaders in an
butterflies, each includes real multiplications (RM ) of 3 and
N -length OFDM vector x = [(x(1) )T , · · · , (x(J) )T ]T . The
real additions (RA ) of 3 [16]. Hence, the total RM and RA for
time-domain vector after the inverse C-transform would be
the C-transform are
√
3 yt = CT xR + −1 CT xI , (7)
RM = N (log2 N ) − 3(N − 1) (4a)
2
3 where the matrix C is formed according to (1) and applied to
RA = N (log2 N ) − 3(N − 1). (4b) the real and imaginary parts of x.
2

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Communications Letters
3

p1,1 si
(1) The receiver can use the maximum likelihood (ML) criterion
Spreader to jointly estimate the spreading code index and the data
p1
bits
X symbols. Let us partition xe into J subvectors x e(1) , · · · , x
e(J) ,

Create OFDM vector

bits p1,2 M-ary each has a length of nj , j = 1, · · · , J. The ML estimates the
bits Mapper a(1)
index i and symbol a(j) in the j-th block by

interval
Guard
Data Inverse (j)
bits C-transform (î, â(j) ) = arg min ka(j) si − x
e(j) k22 . (12)
i∈{1,··· ,nj }, a(j) ∈M -ary
(J)
pJ,1 si
Spreader The complexity of evaluating (12) is O(M nj ), which limits
pJ
bits
bits
X the application of ML to low values of M and nj .
pJ,2 M-ary An alternative low-complexity detector for estimating i and
bits Mapper a(J)
a(j) is the maximal ratio combining (MRC). This detector can
be implemented through performing correlation between x e(j)
Fig. 1. The transmit side of the proposed spread spectrum OFDM system.
and each column in S and selecting the code that produces
(j)

the maximum correlation. Thus, the spreading code index i

Similar to the conventional OFDM systems [1]–[16], a for the j-th block is detected as
cyclic prefix (CP) is added to yt as a guard interval to combat (j)
x(j) )† si |2 .
î = arg max |(e (13)
inter-symbol interference and make the signal suitable for i∈{1,··· ,nj }
transmission over frequency-selective channels.
The data symbol is then estimated using the regular maxi-
Excluding CP, SE for the proposed scheme is
PJ mum likelihood method,
j=1 (pj,1 + pj,2 ) (j)
SE = â(j) = arg min ka(j) sî − x
e(j) k22 . (14)
N a(j) ∈M -ary
= (log2 n + log2 M )/n , (8)
MRC detector is not optimal but offers affordable compu-
where (8) results by letting pj,1 = p1,1 , pj,2 = p1,2 , nj = n, ∀j tational cost [2], especially at large values for nj and M .
and noting that p1,1 = log2 n and p1,2 = log2 M .
IV. A NALYSIS
B. Receive Side
We shall derive an upper bound for average BEP under
Let the observed signal at the receiver be rt ∈ CN ×1 . After Rayleigh fading channels and examine the maximum PAPR
removing the CP, it is given by for the proposed OFDM.
rt = ht  yt + wt , (9)
A. Average BEP
where ht is the multipath channel and wt is the additive noise
in time domain. We shall assume for tractability that there is only one block,
We shall follow [14] and perform equalization in frequency i.e., J = 1, and drop the superscript (·)(j) . Let x be the OFDM
domain through the use of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) signal before the inverse C-transform in Fig. 1 and x̂ be its
and inverse DFT (IDFT) operations. If equalization is handled estimation,
√ and represent the error between them by e = (xR −
in time domain, these operations are not required [16]. The x̂R ) + −1(xI − x̂I ). It is noted from (7) and (10) that e
∆
signal rt is converted to the frequency domain through the subjects to an accumulated transformation defined by C e =
DFT matrix A ∈ CN ×N . Hence, (9) becomes T †
(AC ) ∈ C n×n
, where n is the spreader length. The matrix
e is unitary as both A and C are unitary.
C
rf = Hf Ayt + wf , (10)
When the channel Hf is given, the pair-wise error proba-
where Hf = diag(hf ), and hf = Aht and wf = Awt are
∆ ∆ bility (PEP) between x and x̂ is [2], [8],
the DFT for ht and wt . We consider that hf has the elements
s 
kH e † ek2
C
h1 , · · · , hN and each follows zero mean Gaussian with unit P(x → x̂|Hf ) = Q 
f 2
, (15)
2σw 2
variance. The frequency noise wf is Gaussian of covariance
σw2
IN . The quantities hf and σw 2
are known at the receiver.
∆ where Q(·) denotes the q-function.
The frequency signal rf is equalized with Heq = (H†f Hf +
We can equivalently rewrite (15) in the form,
γ −1 IN )−1 H†f using a single tap MMSE equalizer to obtain sP !
the equalized signal req,f = Heq rf , where γ = E[|a|2 ]/σw 2
is n
k=1 δk |hk |
2

the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) [8]. req,f is then returned back P(x → x̂|Hf ) = Q 2
, (16)
2σw
to the time domain to yield req,t by IDFT; req,t is processed
by the real C-transform matrix C as, where δk is given by
√
e = Creq,R + −1 Creq,I ,
x (11) c†k e|2 .
δk = |e (17)
where xe ∈ CN ×1 is the counterpart of the OFDM vector x at ck represents the k-th column of C.
e e (17) gives the absolute
the transmit side. square value for the cross correlation between e
ck and e.

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Performing a procedure similar to that in [8], the average V. N UMERICAL RESULTS

PEP when γ  1 can be upper bounded by
We shall show the performance of the proposed OFDM in
P(x → x̂) = E [P(x → x̂|Hf )] terms of uncoded BER at fixed values of SE. For simplicity, we
(γ/4)−d consider that all the J blocks in Fig. 1 have the same number
≤ Q . (18) of subcarriers n, the index bits p1,1 , and symbol bits p1,2 .
2 k∈Dx,x̂ (δk /E [|a|2 ])
We include for comparison the schemes OFDM-SIM [1], IM-
∆
Dx,x̂ = {k : δk 6= 0} is the set of k values at which δk 6= 0 OFDM-SS [2], P-OFDM-SIM [8], CF-IM-OFDM [13], the C-
and it has d elements. transform based OFDM (C-OFDM) introduced in [16], and the
It is evident Q from (18) that d represents the diversity order conventional OFDM. We shall use the tuple (n, M ) to denote
and the term k∈Dx,x̂ (δk /E[|a|2 ]) is related to the coding the configuration of the proposed scheme and IM-OFDM-SS
and (n, na , M ) to that of OFDM-SIM and P-OFDM-SIM with
gain. The value of d is determined by the transformation C e
na being the number of active subcarriers. The CF-IM-OFDM
and the Walsh matrix S and it approaches n as elaborated next.
system is modelled by (n, L, nc , M ), where L is the length of
Assume that an estimator detects correctly the spreading code
the spreading code and nc is the number of available codes
index such that sî = si but erroneously estimates the M -ary
for each block. The C-OFDM and conventional OFDM are
symbol, i.e., â 6= a. For this case, the cross correlation between
characterized by their modulation only.
ck and e is ec†k e = ec†k si (a − â), and it can be zero only if the
We implement the log-likelihood detector for OFDM-SIM
e
vectors eck and si are orthogonal. Since si is a column from
[1], MRC for IM-OFDM-SS [2], ML detection for P-OFDM-
S and e ck from C, e it is unlikely that e c†k si = 0. It is implied
then δk in (17) cannot have zero value for k = 1, · · · , n, and SIM [8], and square law energy detection (SLED) for CF-IM-
hence d → n. Consider otherwise that the estimator makes OFDM [13]. Our scheme uses MRC or ML for detection.
the decisions sî 6= si and â = a. Hence, e c†k e = ae c†k (si − sî ), The SE expression for IM-OFDM-SS is the same as
(8)
† and for OFDM-SIM or P-OFDM-SIM is SE = (blog2 nna c +
which following the reasoning above entails e ck e 6= 0, δk 6= 0,
na log2 M )/n [8], where nna = na !(n−n n!
and b·c is the


and d → n. We can follow similar argument to conclude that a )!

d is almost n for the case sî 6= si and â 6= a. floor function. SE for CF-IM-OFDM is SE = log2 (nn Ln
cM )
. For
Based on (18), the average BEP has the union upper bound both C-OFDM and conventional OFDM, it is quantified by
1 XX SE = log2 M .
P(x → x̂) ≤ p P(x → x̂)eb (x, x̂) , (19) We set the total number of subcarriers to N = 1024 and
p2 x
x̂6=x the cyclic prefix to N/4. The proposed scheme, IM-OFDM-
where p = p1,1 + p1,2 and eb (·) gives the number of error bits SS and CF-IM-OFDM employ Walsh codes for spreading
between x and x̂. the data symbols and P-OFDM-SIM uses Walsh matrix for
precoding. The transmission occurs over the international
B. PAPR telecommunication union (ITU) pedestrian A channel model
The PAPR formula can be expressed by that characterizes frequency-selective multipath channels.
Fig. 2 shows the BER performance as Eb /No varies for the
max |yt,l |2 proposed OFDM and the benchmark schemes when SE is set
0≤l≤N −1
PAPR = , (20) to SE = 1 bps/Hz. The proposed OFDM is evaluated when
E [|yt,l |2 ]
the length of the Walsh code is n = 4 and when n = 8. It
where yt,l is the l-th element of the vector yt defined in (7). is observed that our developed OFDM system has comparable
It has the following expression, performance to that of P-OFDM-SIM. It furthermore outper-
J
X (j) (j)
forms the other systems and the performance gap becomes
yt,l = (cl )T si a(j) , (21) clearly noticeable as Eb /No increases. For example at n = 4
j=1 and a BER of 10−4 , the proposed scheme achieves an Eb /No
where cl is the l-th column of C and cl is partitioned as the gain of about 5 dB compared with C-OFDM, 15.5 dB with
(1) (J)
OFDM vector x such that cl = [(cl )T , · · · , (cl )T ]T . IM-OFDM-SS, 15.6 dB with OFDM-SIM, and 22.5 dB with
For simplicity assume that |a | = E |a| and the j-
(j) 2 2 CF-IM-OFDM. This superior performance can be attributed
th block uses the code index i and the code length n, ∀l. It to the C-transform that offers incremental diversity order.
becomes straightforward to show that the maximum PAPR is The schemes IM-OFDM-SS, OFDM-SIM, CF-IM-OFDM, and
conventional OFDM can be easily affected by bad channels as
PAPR ≤ (J/2)n . (22)
they use DFT only. Fig. 2 indicates that the proposed scheme
(22) is achieved by examining the structure of the matrix C has improved performance over the benchmarks except P-
and realizing that its columns have at most (Jn/2) non-zero OFDM-SIM when n = 8 with some loss in Eb /No gain.
elements. This loss in performance is expected as the constellation size
Clearly, our scheme can reduce the maximum PAPR by a M gets larger. The ML and MRC detectors give similar per-
factor of two over the conventional OFDM by recalling that formance for the proposed OFDM at the considered channel
the number of subcarriers is N = Jn. Furthermore, it exhibits model.
lower PAPR than the scheme of [13] when choosing n < 2L, In Fig. 3, we depict the BER performance versus Eb /No at
where L is the length of the code spreader employed in [13]. SE = 1.5 bps/Hz. Since C-OFDM and conventional OFDM

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5

do not support the SE of 1.5 bps/Hz, we evaluate their VI. C ONCLUSION

performance at SE = 1 bps/Hz and SE = 2 bps/Hz. For
high Eb /No regime and 10−4 BER, the proposed scheme
has considerable performance gain over IM-OFDM-SS and
OFDM-SIM by about 13 dB and 14.5 dB. Moreover, we
can notice the proposal achieves 1 dB gain over C-OFDM
at SE = 2 bps/Hz and it becomes in close performance with
the latter when SE = 1 bps/Hz. It also performs quite well
compared to CF-IM-OFDM at high Eb /No . P-OFDM-SIM
exceeds our OFDM system by about 2 dB as the former uses a
matrix precoder at the transmitter and a decoder at the receiver
to gather more diversity order.
We have developed an index modulated OFDM system that
selects a spreading code from an available set and uses its
index to convoy information. This system is equipped with
the C-transform instead of FFT for subcarriers modulation in
the sake of enlarging SE and diversity order. Numerical results
have been conducted over standardized multipath frequency-
selective channels and shown the performance of the proposed
OFDM is quite encouraging. The proposal exhibits Eb /No
gains at BER of 10−4 over IM-OFDM-SS, OFDM-SIM, and
the regular C-OFDM of 15.6 dB, 15.5 dB, and 5 dB with
SE = 1 bps/Hz and of 14.5 dB, 13 dB, and 1 dB with SE = 1.5
bps/Hz for the first two schemes and SE = 2 bps/Hz for the
latest.

10 0 Proposed OFDM (4, 4-QAM), MRC R EFERENCES

Proposed OFDM (4, 4-QAM), ML
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