Practical Design and Implementation of Metamaterial-Enhanced Magnetic Induction Communication

Abstract

Although wireless communications in complex environments, such as underground, underwater, and indoor, can enable a large number of novel applications, their performances are constrained by lossy media and complicated structures. Magnetic Induction (MI) has been proved to be an efficient solution to achieve reliable communication in such environments. However, due to the small coil antenna's physical limitation, MI's communication range is still very limited if devices are required to be portable. To this end, Metamaterial-enhanced Magnetic Induction (M${}^2$I) communication has been proposed and the theoretical results predict that it can significantly increase the communication performance, namely, data rate and communication range. Nevertheless, currently, the real implementation of M${}^2$I is still a challenge and there is no guideline on design and fabrication of spherical metamaterials. In this paper, a practical design is proposed by leveraging a spherical coil array to realize M${}^2$I. We prove that the effectively negative permeability can be achieved and there exists a resonance condition where the radiated magnetic field can be significantly amplified. The radiation and communication performances are evaluated and full-wave simulation is conducted to validate the design objectives. By using the spherical coil array-based M${}^2$I, the communication range can be significantly extended, exactly as we predicted in the ideal M${}^2$I model. Finally, the proposed M${}^2$I antenna is implemented and tested in various environments.

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1510.08466

References in corpus (3)

• Metamaterial-Enhanced Coupling between Magnetic Dipoles for Efficient Wireless Power Transfer
• Experimental demonstration of a mu=-1 metamaterial lens for magnetic resonance imaging
• M${}^2$I: Channel Modeling for Metamaterial-Enhanced Magnetic Induction Communications

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• Underwater Cooperative MIMO Communications using Hybrid Acoustic and Magnetic Induction Technique
• Fast-Fading Channel and Power Optimization of the Magnetic Inductive Cellular Network
• Towards the Internet of Underground Things: A Systematic Survey