Design and Performance Analysis of Index Modulation Empowered AFDM System

In this letter, we incorporate index modulation (IM) into affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM), called AFDM-IM, to enhance the bit error rate (BER) and energy efficiency (EE) performance. In this scheme, the information bits are conveyed not only by $M$-ary constellation symbols, but also by the activation of the chirp subcarriers (SCs) indices, which are determined based on the incoming bit streams. Then, two power allocation strategies, namely power reallocation (PR) strategy and power saving (PS) strategy, are proposed to enhance BER and EE performance, respectively. Furthermore, the average bit error probability (ABEP) is theoretically analyzed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed AFDM-IM scheme achieves better BER performance than the conventional AFDM scheme.