Recently, the research team of Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has made breakthrough progress in the field of underground wireless communications.Developed a "Wi-Fi"-like wireless networking technology that can penetrate the ground, achieving stable communication at a depth of 100 meters below the surface. Relevant research results have been officially published in the IEEEXplore journal.
Traditional underground wireless communications have always been limited by the inherent shortcomings of radio frequency signals. When radio waves penetrate soil and rock media, serious signal attenuation and quality degradation will occur.
Even the existing commercial through-the-ground communication systems do not rely on magnetic field technology, but rely on extremely high transmission power to barely reach the available transmission distance. Not only are the devices large in size and power consumption high, but the application scenarios are also greatly restricted.
The core breakthrough of this team is to use magnetic induction technology to replace the traditional radio frequency transmission scheme. As early as 2023, the team used the voltage drive method to verify the feasibility of through-ground wireless communication for the first time. At that time, only an underground transmission distance of 40 meters could be achieved.
In order to break through the performance bottleneck, the team developed a current-driven magnetic induction solution, which uses low-frequency radio waves to penetrate the ground with the help of magnetic fields, fundamentally avoiding the attenuation problem of traditional radio frequency signals, and ultimately significantly increasing the stable communication distance to 100 meters.
The team completed the technical verification in a limestone bedrock environment with strong shielding ability for radio frequency signals.The complete set of test equipment includes a 0.9-meter × 0.9-meter transmitting loop antenna, a small magnetic field receiving sensor, and a wireless communication system using quadrature phase shift keying modulation. The current data transmission rate is 2Kb/s. Although the bandwidth is limited, it can meet the basic data transmission needs of core scenarios such as emergency communications.
According to reports, this new technology does not require extremely high transmission power, has the core advantages of miniaturization and low power consumption, and has a wide range of implementation scenarios.
At present, ETRI has begun research on integrating this technology into smartphones. Once popularized, it can cover underground operations and leisure scenes such as tunnel construction and cave exploration.. The most important thing is that it can build a critical communication lifeline for trapped and lost people underground and emergency rescue teams. In addition, this technology also has extremely high application value in offshore drilling, national defense and other fields.