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

The idea of Media-based Modulation (MBM), introduced in [1] [2], is based on embedding information in the variations of the transmission media (channel states). This is in contrast to legacy wireless systems (called Signal-Based Modulation, SBM, in current article) where data is embedded in a RadioFrequency (RF) source prior to the transmit antenna. MBM offers several advantages vs. 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 and multiple receive antennas (Single Input-Multiple Output MediaBased Modulation, or SIMO-MBM). Furthermore, to address complexity issues (hardware and algorithmic complexities, as well as the training overhead) that limit the amount of data that can be embedded in channel states using a single transmit unit, Layered Multiple Input-Multiple Output Media-Based Modulation (LMIMO-MBM) is introduced in [3]. Current articles compares performance of MBM and LMIMO-MBM vs. legacy Multiple Input-Multiple Output (MIMO), and a recently introduced modulation scheme called Spatial Modulation (SM) and its generalization called Generalized Spatial Modulation (GSM). These comparisons demonstrate significant performance gains for MBM and LMIMO-MBM vs. these known techniques.