Design and Performance Analysis of an Index Time Frequency Modulation Scheme for Optical Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces an index-time frequency hopping (I-TFH) scheme for optical communications, analyzing its efficiency, error performance, and comparing it with existing index modulation systems, showing superior performance in BER and power efficiency.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel index-time frequency hopping (I-TFH) scheme for optical communications and provides a comprehensive performance analysis and comparison with existing systems.

Findings

I-TFH outperforms existing index modulation schemes in BER and power efficiency.

The derived error probability approximations are accurate across various SNRs.

Simulation results confirm the advantages of I-TFH in practical scenarios.

Abstract

In this article, we propose an index modulation system suitable for optical communications, based on jointly driving the time and frequency of the signal: an index-time frequency hopping (I-TFH) system. We analyze its performance from the point of view of its efficiency in power and spectrum, and its behavior in terms of error probability for the non-turbulent free-space optical (FSO) channel. We compare I-TFH with already proposed index modulated systems of the same nature, but where the amplitude or the number of transmitters are driven instead of the signal frequency. We derive and compare approximations for the average symbol and bit error probabilities of all these systems. The simulation results show that said approximations are tight enough for a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios and system parameters. Moreover, I-TFH shows to be better performing in BER and/or power efficiency than the comparative alternatives, and may offer interesting properties in a variety of contexts.