PCB Planar and Filamentary Planar Spiral Coils based Underground Magnetic Induction Communication with Enhanced Channel Model

Abstract

A novel idea of using compact filamentary and printed circuit board (PCB) planar spiral coils for the magnetic induction (MI) based underground (UG) communication to achieve high received power and enhanced transmission distance is proposed. In the existing system, non-planar coils were employed as transceivers which lost their function due to their huge size and deployment difficulty. An enhanced MI UG channel model is proposed to accurately investigate the UG medium’s influence on the MI system performance by considering various soil properties that were considered negligible in the earlier models. An analytical approach to calculate self-inductance and mutual inductance of circular and square coils of filamentary planar and PCB planar spiral coils are described from which the communication parameters such as received power, path-loss, and signal-to-ratio are derived. The simulation results reveal that in both filamentary and PCB planar spiral coil, the square shape coil performs better than the circular coil. The filamentary planar spiral square coil (FPSSC) achieves 26.15% higher received power than the PCB planar spiral square coil (PPSSC) due to the former coil’s low resistance and strong mutual coupling. Further, the influence of coil parameters, coil misalignment, and soil properties on the received power is studied for both FPSSC and PPSSC systems, and their major performance influencing parameters are identified. The received power of the proposed FPSSC system exhibits a significant improvement of 31.24% as compared to the traditional non-planar MI coil system.