Physical Layer Design of Energy-Efficient Data Transmission in 2D Communication Environments

This paper proposes a method to determine a physical layer (PHY) parameter that minimizes energy-per-bit rate (EBR) in a two-dimensional communication (2DC) environment. EBR is the power consumption used for 1-bit transmission/reception. 2DC uses a sheet-like waveguide medium, which guides the microwave along the sheet. In our previous work, the possibility of energy-efficient data transmission by using TransferJet devices in 2DC environment was reported. The reported maximum transmission rate was 71.1 Mbps with a power consumption of 118 mW. The EBR was two orders of magnitude lower than that of ZigBee despite the same power consumption. However, the data rate significantly degraded at some transceiver positions depending on the delay spread of the 2DC channel. The decrease of the transmission rate was caused by a mismatch between the PHY parameter of the communication system and the characteristics of the communication environment. This paper presents a method to determine an optimum PHY parameter for minimizing EBR. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the energy-efficient data transmission in 2DC environments.