Comparison of Index Modulation Techniques in OFDM Systems Under Jamming Attacks

Index modulation (IM) is a promising technique for enhancing system resilience against jamming attacks in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Dual-mode IM OFDM (DM-OFDM) offers notable potential among the various types of IM techniques. Motivated by this fact, in this paper, we explore the robustness of DM-OFDM under jamming attacks in comparison to the traditional OFDM and OFDM-IM systems. Our investigation focuses on a practical resource mapping scenario relevant to 5G cellular standards. The key finding is that while the DM-OFDM system demonstrates strong performance under limited jamming, its advantage over the compared systems decreases as the jamming power increases. Nevertheless, the DM-OFDM system continues to show robustness when the impact of the jamming signals is restricted to a small subset of subcarriers.