Throughput of the Magnetic Induction Based Wireless Underground Sensor Networks: Key Optimization Techniques

Wireless underground sensor networks (WUSNs) present a variety of new research challenges. Recently, a magnetoinductive (MI) waveguide technique has been proposed to cope with the very harsh propagation conditions in WUSNs. This relay-based approach allows for an extension of the transmission range, which can be quite limited if relays are not deployed. In this paper, tree-based WUSNs are considered. The objective of our work is to determine the optimal system parameters, topology, and deployment strategy in order to avoid bottlenecks in the system and achieve optimal network throughput. We compare two different deployment schemes: MI waveguides and direct MI transmission (no relays deployed) based connections between sensors. The two schemes are different in nature and propagation characteristics. Therefore, different optimization techniques are utilized. The optimal set of system parameters is chosen to maximize the channel capacity of the worst link and therefore optimize the available data rate. The bottleneck throughput of the direct MI transmission based network can be then compared with the respective results of the MI waveguides based network. In several cases, we observe a better performance of the direct MI transmission based networks.