Practical Design and Implementation of Metamaterial-Enhanced Magnetic Induction Communication

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical design for metamaterial-enhanced magnetic induction communication using a spherical coil array, significantly extending communication range and validating the concept through simulations and real-world tests.

Contribution

It introduces a novel spherical coil array design to realize M$^2$I, achieving negative permeability and resonance for improved magnetic induction communication.

Findings

Communication range is significantly extended with the proposed design.

Full-wave simulations validate the effectiveness of the spherical coil array.

Real-world tests confirm the practical viability of the M$^2$I antenna.

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.