Single-carrier media-based modulation in ISI channels

Abstract

A promising modulation scheme called media-based modulation (MBM) is attracting recent research attention. In MBM, radio frequency (RF) mirrors (parasitic elements) are placed near the transmit antenna in order to create different channel fade realizations based on the ON/OFF status of these mirrors, and the resulting complex fade realizations constitute the MBM channel alphabet. The key advantages of MBM are: i) the number of bits conveyed through the choice of the OF/OFF status of the mirrors increases linearly with the number of RF mirrors, and ii) it possesses very good performance attributes due to the additive properties of information over multiple receive antennas. In this paper, we present a study of MBM in ISI channels with a focus on cyclic prefixed single carrier (CPSC) systems. Our new contributions in this paper can be summarized as follows: i) it is shown that, for the same spectral efficiency, CPSC-MBM scheme can outperform conventional OFDM and CPSC schemes, ii) an eigen-value based diversity analysis of the CPSC-MBM scheme is presented; simulation results validate the analytically obtained diversity orders, and iii) a novel message passing based low-complexity algorithm for CPSC-MBM signal detection that scales well and achieves good performance is proposed.