Efficient Information Transmission Using Smart OFDM for IoT Applications

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is one of the most widely adopted modulation schemes because it offers several desirable features, such as spectral efficiency and low complexity implementation. Moreover, it is highly suitable for adaptive implementation. Nevertheless, OFDM does not have any special immunity against multipath fading as compared to single-carrier systems. Therefore, we propose in this article a new OFDM configuration, denoted as OFDM-smart (OFDM-S), where superposition modulation is used to introduce transmit diversity to reduce the bit error rate (BER) while maintaining the spectral efficiency and bit rate fixed. The proposed scheme is based on clustering specific subcarriers that can cooperate by sharing their transmission resources. The cooperation is performed such that all subcarriers transmit their data jointly using all the subcarriers within their cluster. The system performance is derived in terms of BER performance over Nakagami- $m$ frequency-selective fading channels where efficient expressions are presented in terms of a single finite integral, and closed-form expressions are derived for the asymptotic BER. The obtained analytical results corroborated by simulation show that the OFDM-S can provide substantial BER improvement over conventional OFDM, due to the transmit diversity.