Index modulation aided uplink NOMA for massive machine type communications

Single-carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA) based index modulation (IM), referred here as SC-IM, allows users to implicitly transmit a part of their data bits by switching on some of their allocated subcarriers, followed by M-ary constellation symbols transmission over the activated subcarriers. This sparse use of subcarriers provides better energy efficiency and error rate. Using these benefits, this letter exploits SC-IM with uplink power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), where all users with the same allocated subcarrier set can simultaneously transmit their SC-IM data with different power levels, which are exploited by the receiver to perform multi-user detection. Performance of the proposed technique is analyzed and compared with conventional NOMA. It is shown that the proposed scheme can achieve energy efficient massive connectivity, which is a primary requirement for massive machine-type communications.