Spatial modulation based on reconfigurable antennas — A new air interface for the IoT

The emerging market of the Internet of Things (IoT) requires new energy-efficient and low-complexity Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO-) aided radio access technologies. This trend will have a profound impact on both the theory and practice of future communication networks, which will not be purely optimized for approaching the attainable capacity anymore, but will explicitly include the energy efficiency for the design and optimization of the entire protocol stack. In this paper, we discuss a recently introduced modulation scheme for IoT applications, which leverages the concepts of Reconfigurable Antennas (RecAnts) and Spatial Modulation (SM). RecAnt-SM constitutes a promising new air interface in the context of MIMO-aided transmission, which can be beneficially invoked for the design of medium-throughput, low-complexity and energy-efficient communication systems by relying on a limited number of RF chains and the flexibility of simple RecAnt designs.