Wireless Communications and IoT in Extreme Environments

Wireless communications and IoT in extreme environments, such as underground and underwater, can enable various highly desired applications in the environmental, industrial, homeland security, law enforcement, and military fields, such as (i) monitoring and protecting groundwater, volcanos, rivers, and lakes, (ii) controlling the impacts of hydraulic fracturing in oil recovery to the environments, (iii) detecting and assessing damages in complex pipe structures in city sewerage system, nuclear plant cooling system, and oil/natural gas/water transportation system, (iv) real-time connecting military squads or law enforcement personnel in unknown tunnels and buildings, and (v) contacting and rescuing trapped survivors after mine disasters. However, the harsh wireless channel conditions cause extremely high path loss (EM waves in soil and water) or long propagation delay (if acoustic signal is used), which prevents most, if not all, existing wireless communication solutions. To address the above critical problems, my research focuses on (i) the rigorous channel modeling and the real-time sensing/estimation of the target extreme environments, and (ii) the intelligent hybrid communication systems that take advantages of different physical signal propagation techniques, such as radio frequency, magnetic induction, acoustic, and visible light techniques.