High-Rate Ultrasonic Through-Wall Communications Using MIMO-OFDM

This paper investigates methods to achieve high-rate data transmission through metallic barriers using ultrasound. Multiple-input-multiple-output-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) is employed in conjunction with interference mitigation techniques to reduce throughput-limiting crosstalk. Several crosstalk mitigation strategies are investigated and their theoretical and practical bit-loaded data rates are determined for the general case of A transmitters and A receivers (A×A MIMO). A physical MIMO acoustic-electric channel array is formed using a 40 mm (1.575 in) thick steel barrier with seven pairs of 4 MHz nominal resonant frequency piezoelectric disk transducers, each with 10 mm (0.394 in) diameter. To investigate the effects of crosstalk, the transducers are closely spaced, and each transmitter-receiver pair is coaxially aligned on opposing sides of the metallic barrier. It is shown that, with the use of crosstalk mitigation techniques, the aggregate multichannel theoretical capacity performance scales linearly with the number of channels. This paper also investigates the use of novel power allocation techniques in a MIMO-OFDM acoustic-electric channel, which show significant throughput performance gains over conventional bit-loading and greedy bit-filling techniques. Finally, this paper presents a study on the effects of transducer misalignment on the multichannel theoretical capacity and achievable data transmission rates using bit-loading techniques.