Design and Implementation of Magnetic Induction based Wireless Underground Communication System Supporting Distance Measurement

In this paper, we present our proposed magnetic induction based wireless communication system. The proposed system is designed to perform communication as well as distance measurement in underground environments. In order to improve the communication quality, we propose and implement the adaptive channel compensation technique. Based on the fact that the channel may be fast time-varying, we keep track of the channel status each time the data is received and accordingly compensate the channel coefficient for any change in the channel status. By using the proposed compensation technique, the developed platform can reliably communicate over distances of 10m while the packet error rate is being maintained under 5%. We also implement the distance measurement block that is useful for various applications that should promptly estimate the location of nearby nodes in communication. The distance between two nodes in communication is estimated by generating a table describing pairs of the magnetic signal strength and the corresponding distance. The experiment result shows that the platform can estimate the distance of a node located within 10m range with the measurement error less than 50cm.