Implementation of Noncoherent Media-Based Modulation With a Reconfigurable Metasurface

Media-based modulation (MBM) has been proposed recently as an energy and bandwidth-efficient communication scheme where the channel-fading coefficients represent the symbols in an alphabet. Conventional MBM requires the measurement of both magnitude and phase of channel-fading coefficients to determine symbols; which is difficult without using a vector network analyzer. In this work, a noncoherent variant of MBM, called dual frequency-shift media-based modulation (DFS-MBM) is proposed, where only the magnitudes of the channel-fading coefficients are required to constitute symbols. This opens the door for a software-defined radio-based cost-effective receiver for a potentially deployable realization of MBM.