Media-Based Modulation with Reconfigurable Intelligent Metasurfaces: Design and Performance

With increasing global wireless connectivity in spectrum-limited congested urban environments, next-generation wireless networks require communications systems that achieve high spectral efficiency at low RF costs. In this context, media-based modulation (MBM) is a recently proposed form of index modulation with data rate, error performance, and hardware benefits. The MBM is a channel modulation technique that employs radiation pattern states of a reconfigurable antenna to encode the information bits. In this paper, we introduce large intelligent reconfigurable metasurface (R-MTS) to implement MBM in beyond fifth-generation (5G) systems. We present a system model for R-MTS-based MBM and design such a surface to demonstrate radiation pattern diversity in a realistic 5G communications system. Our numerical experiments show superior performance of R-MTS MBM in terms of bit error rate (BER) performance over traditional M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) techniques.