The Effect of Hardware Impairments on OFDM-IM Systems over Generalized Non-Homogeneous Fading Channels

In recent years, using of wireless communication devices has increased rapidly around the world with the developments of electronics and information technologies. For this reason, the researches are still continuing intensively on transmission techniques for new wireless communication systems. Various methods is developed to meet the requirements of these new generation systems. The index modulation (IM) method is one of the methods that has a high potential among these developed methods. The IM system has been adapted to the Orthogonal Frequency Multiple Access (OFDM) which represents multi-carrier transmission technique applied in many wireless communication systems since subcarrier indices are treated like antenna indices. Also, in practically, transceivers are incured to hardware impairments (HWIs). It is great importance that the evaluating the performance of wireless systems under the effects of practical the HWIs. In the literature, different channel scenarios are modeled to examine the HWIs and characterize channel environments. Therefore, the fading channel models play an important role in researching ways to provide better quality service. In this paper, besides Rayleigh and Rice fading channels, the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (OFDM-IM) system is analyzed over ? - ?, ? - ? and ? - ? distributions under the impact of the HWIs at the transceiver. These fading channels have simple mathematical formulas for different fading channels model. The effect of channel characteristics are shown via computer simulations on the performance of OFDM-IM systems by calculating average bit error rate (ABER). It is observed that the HWIs significantly decrease the performance of system by using a maximum likelihood (ML) detector. © 2023 IEEE.