Experimental Evaluation of a Near-Field Magnetic Induction Based Communication System

Radio frequency (RF) communications, although most popular, are unsuitable for environments involving aqueous and animal/plant tissue media, dense environments (e.g., small regions with many radios), applications requiring extremely low power consumption, etc. For such environments, magnetic induction (MI) communications are an emerging technology that appears to be very attractive. Although MI communication has been studied for some RF-challenged environments such as underwater, underground and body area networks, most of the studies so far are simulation based with minimal experimentation. In this paper, we show the feasibility of the proposed MI communications, by developing a small testbed using Freelinc boards. We also compare and contrast the existing theoretical claims regarding MI communications with some detailed experimental outcomes, and show how much they differ.