Antenna System Optimization for Active Metamaterial-enhanced Magnetic Induction Communications

摘要

Magnetic induction (MI) communication are widely used in applications in extreme environments, including environment surveillance, past disaster rescue, and resource detection since it does not suffer from high material absorption in lossy media. However, existing MI systems rely on high transmitting power and large antenna to reach practical communication range. Recently, metamaterial enhanced MI (M²I) communication was proposed, which can increase the signal strength of the original MI system to 30 dB in theory. However the latest practical implementation of M²I system only achieves an 8 dB gain due to the metamaterial loss. In this paper, the active meta-material unit is introduced to the current M²I communication system to close the performance gap between theoretical and practical results. The antenna system is optimized based on the rigorously model of circuit, coil array structure and channel. Through analytical deduction and COMSOL simulations, the proposed active M²I antenna system shows significant power gain and improvement in communication range compared with the passive M²I system and the original MI system.