  Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) based communications have emerged as
a new paradigm. This letter proposes a differential reflecting modulation (DRM)
scheme for RIS based communication systems. In DRM, information bits are
jointly carried by the activation permutations of the reflecting patterns and
the phases of the transmitted signals, leading to that DRM can work without any
channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter, RIS or receiver. In other
words, DRM can release the intricate and resource-consuming channel estimation
in the transmission process. Simulation results show that the proposed DRM pays
an acceptable SNR penalty compared to non-differential modulation with coherent
detection.
