  The wireless revolution has already started with the specified vision,
overall objectives, and the first official 3GPP release of 5th generation (5G)
wireless networks. Despite the development of several modern communication
technologies, since the beginning of the modern era of digital communications,
we have been mostly conveying information by altering the amplitude, the phase,
or the frequency of sinusoidal carrier signals, which has inherent drawbacks.
On the other hand, index modulation (IM) provides an alternative dimension to
transmit digital information: the indices of the corresponding communication
systems' building blocks. Media-based modulation (MBM), which is one of the
newest and the most prominent members of the IM family, performs the
transmission of information by altering the far-field radiation pattern of
reconfigurable antennas (RAs) and provides a completely new dimension to convey
information: wireless channel fade realizations themselves through the unique
signature of received signals. The aim of this article is to shed light on this
promising frontier from a broad communication engineering perspective by
discussing the most recent advances as well as possible interesting research
directions in MBM technologies.
