What is index modulation (IM)? This is an interesting question that we have started to hear more and more frequently over the past few years. The aim of this paper is to answer this question in a comprehensive manner by covering not only the basic principles and emerging variants of IM, but also reviewing the most recent as well as promising advances in this field toward the application scenarios foreseen in next-generation wireless networks. More specifically, we investigate three forms of IM: spatial modulation, channel modulation and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with IM, which consider the transmit antennas of a multiple-input multiple-output system, the radio frequency mirrors (parasitic elements) mounted at a transmit antenna and the subcarriers of an OFDM system for IM techniques, respectively. We present the up-to-date advances in these three promising frontiers and discuss possible future research directions for IM-based schemes toward low-complexity, spectrum- and energy-efficient next-generation wireless networks.

Spatial modulation (SM) is an innovative and promising digital modulation technology that strikes an appealing tradeoff between spectral efficiency and energy efficiency with a simple design philosophy. SM enjoys plenty of benefits and shows great potential to fulfill the requirements of future wireless communications. The key idea behind SM is to convey additional information typically through the ON/OFF states of transmit antennas and simultaneously save the implementation cost by reducing the number of radio-frequency chains. As a result, the SM concept can have widespread effects on diverse applications and can be applied in other signal domains, such as frequency/time/code/angle domain or even across multiple domains. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the latest results and progresses in SM research. Specifically, the fundamental principles, variants of system design, and enhancements of SM are described in detail. Furthermore, the integration of the SM family with other promising techniques, applications to emerging communication systems, and extensions to new signal domains are also extensively studied.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (OFDM-IM) performs transmission by considering two modes over OFDM subcarriers, which are the null and the conventional $M$ -ary signal constellation. The spectral efficiency (SE) of the system, however, is limited, since the null mode itself does not carry any information and the number of subcarrier activation patterns increases combinatorially. In this paper, a novel IM scheme, called multiple-mode OFDM-IM (MM-OFDM-IM), is proposed for OFDM systems to improve the SE by conveying information through multiple distinguishable modes and their full permutations. A practical and efficient mode selection strategy, which is constrained on the phase shift keying/quadrature amplitude modulation constellations, is designed. Two efficient detectors that provide different tradeoffs between the error performance and detection complexity are also proposed. The principle of MM-OFDM-IM is further extended to the in-phase and quadrature components of OFDM signals, and the method of generating multiple modes from the $M$ -ary pulse amplitude modulation constellation for this modified scheme is also introduced. Bit error rate (BER) analyses are provided for the proposed schemes. Monte Carlo simulations on BER corroborate the analyses and show that the proposed schemes appear as promising multi-carrier transmission alternatives by outperforming the existing OFDM-IM counterparts.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (OFDM-IM) is a recently developed transmission technique that extends the principle of spatial modulation to OFDM subcarriers. In this paper, the performance of OFDM-IM is studied in terms of the achievable rate assuming an M-ary constellation and that channel state information is available at the receiver. A closed-form lower bound is derived, based on which an interleaved grouping method is proposed for the use of subcarriers. In comparison with the existing grouping method, the proposed one can better benefit from the diversity effects over frequency-selective fading channels, especially when the spacing of any two subcarriers within a subcarrier group is larger than the coherence bandwidth. Through numerical results, it is revealed that OFDM-IM with interleaved grouping outperforms classical OFDM for small M and certain ranges of signal-to-noise ratio. Finally, the effects of modulation types on the performance of OFDM-IM are studied. It is found that the superiority of OFDM-IM over classical OFDM is greater for phase-shift keying than for quadrature amplitude modulation.

Recent research on reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) suggests that RISs can perform passive beamforming and information transfer (PBIT) simultaneously via smart reflections. In this paper, we propose an RIS-enhanced multiple-input single-output system with reflection pattern modulation (RPM) to achieve PBIT, where the joint active and passive beamforming is carefully designed by taking into account the communication outage probability. We formulate an optimization problem to maximize the average received signal power by jointly optimizing the active beamforming at the access point (AP) and passive beamforming at the RIS under the assumption that the RISb’s state information is statistically known by the AP, and propose a high-quality suboptimal solution based on the alternating optimization technique. Moreover, a closed-form expression for the asymptotic outage probability of the proposed scheme in Rician fading is derived. The achievable rate of the proposed scheme is also investigated under the assumption that the transmitted symbols are drawn from a finite constellation. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and reveal the effect of various system parameters on the achievable rate. It is shown that the proposed scheme outperforms, in terms of achievable rate, the conventional RIS-assisted system without information transfer.

5G wireless communications expect to bring both high spectrum efficiency and high energy efficiency. To meet the requirements, various new techniques have been proposed. Among these, the recently emerging index modulation has attracted significant interest. By judiciously activating a subset of certain communication building blocks, such as antenna, subcarrier, and time slot, index modulation is claimed to have the potential to meet the challenging 5G needs. In this article, we discuss index modulation and its general and specific representations, enhancements, and potential applications in various 5G scenarios. The objective is to reveal whether, and how, index modulation may strive for more performance gains with less medium resource occupation.