A novel carrier index M‐ary differential chaos shift keying modulation scheme

Abstract To obtain better spectral efficiency and higher bit rate, a novel carrier index M‐ary differential chaos shift keying modulation scheme is proposed. In this system, part of subcarriers is assigned to the chaotic reference so that it can carry extra data bits through carrier index modulation, while one of the remaining subcarriers is activated to transmit the data‐bearing signal. In addition, M‐ary DCSK modulation is also applied to data‐bearing signals based on the constellation theory and Walsh codes. Theoretical bit error rate expressions are derived over the multipath Rayleigh fading and additive white Gaussian noise channels. Simulations and comparisons are performed with various combinations of chaotic sequence lengths, subcarrier numbers and constellation sizes. Results show that the proposed scheme can outperform other counterparts in both spectral efficiency and bit error rate performances.