On the energy efficiency of orthogonal signaling

In this paper, transmission over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, and coherent and noncoherent fading channels using M-ary orthogonal frequency-shift keying (FSK) or on-off frequency-shift keying (OOFSK) is considered. The receiver is assumed to perform hard-decision detection. In this setting, energy required to reliably send one bit of information is investigated. It is shown that for fixed M and duty cycle, bit energy requirements grow without bound as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) vanishes. The minimum bit energy values are numerically obtained for different values of M and the duty cycle. The impact of fading on the energy efficiency is identified. Requirements to approach the minimum bit energy of -1.59 dB are determined.