A Reconfigurable Array for Media Based Spatial Modulation

A composite structure consisting of an array of reconfigurable unit cells and an antenna is proposed for the media-based modulation (MBM) scheme which is one type of spatial modulation technique. In MBM, a single tone is transmitted by the antenna and channel fading coefficients at the receivers are decoded as alphabets. The proposed screen is inspired by the reconfigurable frequency selective surface and the transmission is varied by selectively toggling the switches of individual unit cells to realize different channel fading coefficients for communication. The measured results at several preset states of the array validate this idea and the corresponding scatter and bit-error rate (BER) plots are calculated from the measured complex radiation patterns, which demonstrates its feasibility for the modulation schemes.