Practical Design and Implementation of Metamaterial-Enhanced Magnetic Induction Communication

Abstract

The wireless communications in complex environments, such as underground and underwater, can enable various applications in the environmental, industrial, homeland security, law enforcement, and military fields. However, conventional electromagnetic (EM) wave-based techniques do not work due to the lossy media and complicated structures. Magnetic Induction (MI) has been proved to achieve reliable communication in such environments. However, due to the small antenna size, the communication range of MI is still very limited, especially for the portable mobile devices. To this end, Metamaterial-enhanced Magnetic Induction (M 2 I) communication has been proposed, where the theoretical results predict that it can significantly increase the data rate and range. Nevertheless, there exists a significant gap between the theoretical prediction and the practical realization of M 2 I: the theoretical model relies on an ideal spherical metamaterial while it does not exist in nature. In this paper, a practical design is proposed by leveraging a spherical coil array to realize M 2 I communication. The full-wave simulation is conducted to validate the design objectives. By using the spherical coil array-based M 2 I communication, the communication range can be significantly extended, exactly as we predicted in the ideal M 2 I model. Finally, the proposed M 2 I communication is implemented and tested in various environments.

M2I communication: From theoretical modeling to practical design

“…Even the generated power by a coil antenna attenuate slower than that by an electrical antenna, the intrinsic physical limitation of the highly inductive coil antenna prevents further improving its efficiency [3]. Metamaterial is introduced to MI in [4], where an ideal negative-permeability metamaterial shell is utilized to surround a loop antenna, as shown in Fig. 1.…”

“…The theoretical results predict that a pocket-size loop antenna can achieve around 20 m communication range with high data rate. However, since the considered metematerial in [4] is ideally homogeneous and isotropic which is not available in reality, a practical design is highly desired to validate the theoretically predicted results.…”

“…Besides the shape, since metamaterial is a kind of effective media [10], the effective parameters, such as effective permeability and thickness, are hard to extract. Since in [4], the high efficiency of M 2 I strongly depends on the negative permeability and thickness, it is crucial to find them out.…”

“…In this paper, the ideally theoretical model of Metamaterialenhanced Magnetic Induction (M 2 I) communication in [4] is pushed forward to a practical design. Specifically, we substitute the ideally homogeneous and isotropic metamaterial with a spherical coil array to realize M 2 I.…”

“…We prove that this spherical coil array can achieve negative permeability. In addition, the optimal configuration of the proposed spherical coil array is found and its communication performances are similar as the ideal M 2 I in [4], both of which are much better than the original MI [1]. The results are evaluated and validated by full-wave simulations.…”