Wireless Underground Channel Diversity Reception With Multiple Antennas for Internet of Underground Things

Authors

Abdul Salam, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Mehmet C. Vuran, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

2017

Citation

A. Salam and M. C. Vuran, "Wireless underground channel diversity reception with multiple antennas for internet of underground things," 2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Paris, France, 2017.

Comments

©2017 IEEE

Abstract

Internet of underground things (IOUT) is an emerging paradigm which consists of sensors and communication devices, partly or completely buried underground for real-time soil sensing and monitoring. In this paper, the performance of different modulation schemes in IOUT communications is studied through simulations and experiments. The spatial modularity of direct, lateral, and reflected components of the UG channel is exploited by using multiple antennas. First, it has been shown that bit error rates of $10^{-3}$ can be achieved with normalized delay spreads ($\tau_d$) lower than $0.05$. Evaluations are conducted through the first software-defined radio-based field experiments for UG channel. Moreover, equalization has a significant impact on the performance improvement of an IOUT system. An $8$-Tap DFE (decision-feedback equalizer) adaptive equalizer achieves better performance. It is also found that DBPSK, and DPSK are more suitable for digital communications in the UG channel without adaptive equalization. Then, two novel UG receiver designs, namely, 3W-Rake and Lateral-Direct-Reflected (LDR) are developed and analyzed for performance improvement. It has been shown that with a three antenna LDR design, BER of lower than $10^{-5}$ can be achieved. The BER of these two approaches are compared and the LDR has been shown to perform better.