Towards Building Low Power Magnetic Communication Protocols for Challenging Environments

Magnetic Induction (MI) based communication is a near-field communications technology that can work reliably in a variety of difficult propagation media and thus can be useful in many short-range IoT applications. In this paper, we explore low-power protocols for MI communications with low data rate requirements but a premium on energy consumption. In particular, we exploit communication through silence (CTS), and show that it can reduce the energy expenditure of the communication by up to 67% as opposed to typical binary packet based transmission. We also discuss a multi-channel tree based routing protocol to reduce energy consumption from overhearing in asynchronous MI communication networks and show that the proposed scheme can reduce the overhearing counts by ~60% with two channels and by ~80% with four channels.