A Reconfigurable Screen in the Antenna Nearfield for Media-Based Modulation Scheme

Abstract

A novel application for reconfigurable screen of unit cell array in the nearfield of an antenna is proposed for media-based modulation (MBM) technique. In MBM, a single tone is transmitted by an antenna and the channel fading coefficients at the receivers are the alphabets. The proposed screen structure is inspired by a frequency selective surface, where transmission through a unit cell is varied to achieve different channel fading coefficients. A 4×4 array of unit cells is used to generate different alphabets for MBM at an operating frequency of 5 GHz. The measured results validate simulations and the corresponding scatterplot or alphabet is calculated from the measured data, that demonstrates the feasibility for MBM.