Performance Evaluation of Media-based Modulation in Comparison with Spatial Modulations and Legacy SISO/MIMO

The idea of media-based modulation (MBM), introduced in [1] [2], is to embed information in the variations of the transmission media (channel states). This is in contrast to legacy wireless systems which embeds data in a radio frequency (RF) source prior to the transmit antenna. MBM offers several advantages over legacy systems, including “additivity of information over multiple receive antennas” and “inherent diversity over a static fading channel”. MBM is particularly suitable for transmitting high data rates using a single transmit unit and multiple receive antennas (single input multiple output MBM, or SIMO-MBM). Furthermore, layered multiple input multiple output MBM (LMIMO-MBM) [3] addresses hardware and decoding complexity along with training overhead when transmitting high data rates using a single MBM transmit unit. The current article compares the performance of MBM and LMIMO-MBM vs. legacy multiple input multiple output (MIMO) and emerging modulation techniques, spatial modu-lation (SM), and its variants, such as generalized SM (GSM) and quadrature SM (QSM). These comparisons demonstrate considerable performance gains for MBM and LMIMO-MBM vs. these notable schemes.