Increasing the Capacity of Magnetic Induction Communications in RF-Challenged Environments

Abstract

Magnetic Induction (MI) techniques enable efficient wireless communications in dense media with high material absorptions, such as underground soil medium and oil reservoirs. A wide range of novel and important applications in such RF-challenged environments can be realized based on the MI communication mechanism. Despite the potential advantages, the major bottleneck of the MI communication is the limited channel capacity due to the low MI bandwidth. In this paper, the Spread Resonance (RS) strategy is developed for the MI communication in RF-challenged environments which greatly increases the MI channel capacity. Specifically, instead of using the same resonant frequency for all the MI coils, the spread resonance strategy allocates different resonant frequencies for different MI relay and transceiver coils. An optimization solution for the resonant frequency allocation is formulated to maximize the MI channel capacity which captures multiple unique MI effects, including the parasitic capacitor in each MI coil, the Eddy currents in various transmission media with limited conductivities, and the random direction of each coil. Numerical evaluations are provided to validate the significant channel capacity improvements by the proposed SR strategy for MI communication systems.