Wireless underground sensor networks (WUSNs) can enable many important applications such as intelligent agriculture, pipeline fault diagnosis, mine disaster rescue, concealed border patrol, crude oil exploration, among others. The key challenge to realize WUSNs is the wireless communication in underground environments. Most existing wireless communication systems utilize the dipole antenna to transmit and receive propagating electromagnetic (EM) waves, which do not work well in underground environments due to the very high material absorption loss. The Magnetic Induction (MI) technique provides a promising alternative solution that could address the current problem in underground. Although the MI-based underground communication has been intensively investigated theoretically, to date, seldom effort has been made in developing a testbed for the MI-based underground communication that can validate the theoretical results. In this paper, a testbed of MI-based communication system is designed and implemented in an in-lab underground environment. The testbed realizes and tests not only the original MI mechanism that utilizes single coil but also recent developed techniques that use the MI waveguide and the 3-directional (3D) MI coils. The experiments are conducted in an in-lab underground environment with reconfigurable environmental parameters such as soil composition and water content. This paper provides the principles and guidelines for developing the MI underground communications testbed, which is very complicated and time-consuming due to the new communication mechanism and the new wireless transmission medium.
Despite the active theoretical research, the implementations and experimental results on MI underground communications are seldom developed. A few implementation of MI techniques has been done in the areas other than communications. In @cite_5 , MI techniques are used to create a charger along the railway that keeps charging the trains. In [17,24-28], two coupled MI coils are used to transfer the electric power between portable wireless devices. In [17,26], the MI waveguide with strong coupled neighbor coils is tested. None of the above implementation and experiments are used to evaluate the MI-based communications. Moreover, those experiments on MI techniques are taken in the air medium. No experiments have been taken to see the MI communication performance in the complicated underground medium.
@cite_5
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Magnetic induction (MI) communication technique has shown great potentials in complex and RF-challenging environments, such as underground and underwater, due to its advantage over EM wave-based techniques in penetrating lossy medium. However, the transmission distance of MI techniques is limited since magnetic field attenuates very fast in the near field. To this end, this paper proposes metamaterial-enhanced magnetic induction ( @math ) communication mechanism, where an MI coil antenna is enclosed by a metamaterial shell that can enhance the magnetic fields around the MI transceivers. As a result, the @math communication system can achieve tens of meters communication range by using pocket-sized antennas. In this paper, an analytical channel model is developed to explore the fundamentals of the @math mechanism, in the aspects of communication range and channel capacity, and the susceptibility to various hostile and complex environments. The theoretical model is validated through the finite element simulation software, Comsol Multiphysics. Proof-of-concept experiments are also conducted to validate the feasibility of @math . Recently, the remarkable capacity potential of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems was unveiled. The predicted enormous capacity gain of MIMO is nonetheless significantly limited by cochannel interference (CCI) in realistic cellular environments. The previously proposed advanced receiver technique improves the system performance at the cost of increased receiver complexity, and the achieved system capacity is still significantly away from the interference-free capacity upper bound, especially in environments with strong CCI. In this paper, base station cooperative processing is explored to address the CCI mitigation problem in downlink multicell multiuser MIMO networks, and is shown to dramatically increase the capacity with strong CCI. Both information-theoretic dirty paper coding approach and several more practical joint transmission schemes are studied with pooled and practical per-base power constraints, respectively. Besides the CCI mitigation potential, other advantages of cooperative processing including the power gain, channel rank conditioning advantage, and macrodiversity protection are also addressed. The potential of our proposed joint transmission schemes is verified with both heuristic and realistic cellular MIMO settings. Massive MIMO systems are well-suited for mm-Wave communications, as large arrays can be built with reasonable form factors, and the high array gains enable reasonable coverage even for outdoor communications. One of the main obstacles for using such systems in frequency-division duplex mode, namely, the high overhead for the feedback of channel state information (CSI) to the transmitter, can be mitigated by the recently proposed joint spatial division and multiplexing (JSDM) algorithm. In this paper, we analyze the performance of this algorithm in some realistic propagation channels that take into account the partial overlap of the angular spectra from different users, as well as the sparsity of mm-Wave channels. We formulate the problem of user grouping for two different objectives, namely, maximizing spatial multiplexing and maximizing total received power in a graph-theoretic framework. As the resulting problems are numerically difficult, we proposed (sub optimum) greedy algorithms as efficient solution methods. Numerical examples show that the different algorithms may be superior in different settings. We furthermore develop a new, “degenerate” version of JSDM that only requires average CSI at the transmitter and thus greatly reduces the computational burden. Evaluations in propagation channels obtained from ray tracing results, as well as in measured outdoor channels, show that this low-complexity version performs surprisingly well in mm-Wave channels. Wireless charging through directed radio frequency (RF) waves is an emerging technology that can be used to replenish the battery of a sensor node, albeit at the cost of data communi- cation in the network. This tradeoff between energy transfer and communication functions requires a fresh perspective on medium access control (MAC) protocol design for appropriately sharing the channel. Through an experimental study, we demonstrate how the placement, the chosen frequency, and number of the RF energy transmitters impact the sensor charging time. These studies are then used to design a MAC protocol called RF-MAC that optimizes energy delivery to sensor nodes, while minimizing disruption to data communication. In the course of the protocol design, we describe mechanisms for (i) setting the maximum energy charging threshold, (ii) selecting specific transmitters based on the collective impact on charging time, (iii) requesting and granting energy transfer requests, and (iv) evaluating the respective priorities of data communication and energy transfer. To the best of our knowl- edge, this is the first distributed MAC protocol for RF energy harvesting sensors, and through a combination of experimenta- tion and simulation studies, we observe 300 maximum network throughput improvement over the classical modified unslotted CSMA MAC protocol.