  Media-based modulation (MBM) is a novel modulation technique that can improve
the spectral efficiency of the existing wireless systems. In MBM, multiple
radio frequency (RF) mirrors are placed near the transmit antenna(s) and are
switched ON/OFF to create different channel fade realizations. In such systems,
additional information is conveyed through the ON/OFF status of RF mirrors
along with conventional modulation symbols. A challenging task at the receiver
is to detect the transmitted information symbols and extract the additional
information from the channel fade realization used for transmission. In this
paper, we consider a massive MIMO (mMIMO) system where each user relies on MBM
for transmitting information to the base station, and investigate the problem
of symbol detection at the base station. First, we propose a mirror activation
pattern (MAP) selection based modified iterative sequential detection
algorithm. With the proposed algorithm, the most favorable MAP is selected,
followed by the detection of symbol corresponding to the selected MAP. Each
solution is subjected to the reliability check before getting the update. Next,
we introduce a $K$ favorable MAP search based iterative interference
cancellation (KMAP-IIC) algorithm. In particular, a selection rule is
introduced in KMAP-IIC for deciding the set of favorable MAPs over which
iterative interference cancellation is performed, followed by a greedy update
scheme for detecting the MBM symbols corresponding to each user. Simulation
results show that the proposed detection algorithms exhibit superior
performance-complexity trade-off over the existing detection techniques in
MBM-mMIMO systems.
