Taking Advantage of Multiple Scattering to Communicate with Time-Reversal Antennas

Abstract

We present an experimental demonstration showing that, contrary to first intuition, the more scattering a mesoscopic medium is, the more information can be conveyed through it. We used a multiple input-multiple output configuration: a multichannel ultrasonic time-reversal antenna is used to transmit random series of bits simultaneously to different receivers which were only a few wavelengths apart. Whereas the transmission is free of error when multiple scattering occurs in the propagation medium, the error rate is huge in a homogeneous medium.