  In this paper, we consider {\em media-based modulation (MBM)}, an attractive
modulation scheme which is getting increased research attention recently, for
the uplink of a massive MIMO system. Each user is equipped with one transmit
antenna with multiple radio frequency (RF) mirrors (parasitic elements) placed
near it. The base station (BS) is equipped with tens to hundreds of receive
antennas. MBM with $m_{rf}$ RF mirrors and $n_r$ receive antennas over a
multipath channel has been shown to asymptotically (as $m_{rf}\rightarrow
\infty$) achieve the capacity of $n_r$ parallel AWGN channels. This suggests
that MBM can be attractive for use in massive MIMO systems which typically
employ a large number of receive antennas at the BS. In this paper, we
investigate the potential performance advantage of multiuser MBM (MU-MBM) in a
massive MIMO setting. Our results show that multiuser MBM (MU-MBM) can
significantly outperform other modulation schemes. For example, a bit error
performance achieved using 500 receive antennas at the BS in a massive MIMO
system using conventional modulation can be achieved using just 128 antennas
using MU-MBM. Even multiuser spatial modulation, and generalized spatial
modulation in the same massive MIMO settings require more than 200 antennas to
achieve the same bit error performance. Also, recognizing that the MU-MBM
signal vectors are inherently sparse, we propose an efficient MU-MBM signal
detection scheme that uses compressive sensing based reconstruction algorithms
like orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), compressive sampling matching pursuit
(CoSaMP), and subspace pursuit (SP).
