Existing wireless networks do not perform in many hostile and complex environments, including the underground, underwater, oil reservoirs, groundwater aquifers, nuclear plants, pipelines, tunnels, and the concrete buildings. The wireless networking capability in such environments can enable important applications in the environmental, industrial, homeland security, law enforcement, and military fields, such as monitoring and maintenance of groundwater and/or oil reservoirs using wireless sensor networks, damage assessment and mitigation in nuclear plants using robot swarms, or real-time projection of information to and from military squads in unknown tunnels and bunkers, among others. However, the harsh wireless channels prevent the direct usage of the electromagnetic (EM) wave-based techniques due to the high material absorption when penetrating the lossy medium. Moreover, since practical environments can be complex combinations of air, water, soil, concrete, and metal, solutions only applicable for one single medium, e.g., acoustic wave based networking for underwater medium, do not work. To this end, this project investigates the wireless networks based on a new communication mechanism, i.e., metamaterial-enhanced magnetic induction (M2I), which can establish reliable wireless connections in the aforementioned hostile and complex environments. The project can eliminate the environmental barriers to existing wireless applications and radically change current communication and sensing systems.
The project will explore the fundamentals of M2I-based wireless networks through a closed-loop combination of mathematical modeling, simulations, and experimental evaluation. M2I uses magnetic induction (MI) as the physical signal carrier for best penetration. Different from the very limited range in most MI techniques, M2I takes advantage of a metamaterial layer outside each antenna to achieve reasonable communication range for practical applications (tens of meters with pocket-sized devices). Moreover, all the nodes in the wireless network as well as the conductive objects in the environments are strongly coupled together (due to M2I), forming a Meta-environment, which enables unique networking functionalities, such as the passive relaying and environment-aware localization. The core contributions are in four main thrusts: (i) M2I antenna modeling and design; (ii) channel, interference, and capacity analysis under the new networking paradigm; (iii) environment-aware localization algorithms based on the M2I-enabled cognition capability; (iv) performance evaluation and prototyping through a cross layer simulator based on Comsol Multiphysics and NS-3, and a testbed based on software-defined radios and lab-fabricated metamaterials.
