  In this paper, we propose an adaptive orthogonal frequency-division
multiplexing (OFDM) index modulation (IM) scheme for two-hop relay networks. In
contrast to the traditional OFDM IM scheme with a deterministic and fixed
mapping scheme, in this proposed adaptive OFDM IM scheme, the mapping schemes
between a bit stream and indices of active subcarriers for the first and second
hops are adaptively selected by a certain criterion. As a result, the active
subcarriers for the same bit stream in the first and second hops can be varied
in order to combat slow frequency-selective fading. In this way, the system
reliability can be enhanced. Additionally, considering the fact that a relay
device is normally a simple node, which may not always be able to perform
mapping scheme selection due to limited processing capability, we also propose
an alternative adaptive methodology in which the mapping scheme selection is
only performed at the source and the relay will simply utilize the selected
mapping scheme without changing it. The analyses of average outage probability,
network capacity and symbol error rate (SER) are given in closed form for
decode-and-forward (DF) relaying networks and are substantiated by numerical
results generated by Monte Carlo simulations.
