The shower curtain effect in time-reversal wireless communication

Time reversal is a scheme that has its origins in wideband transmission in underwater acoustics and ultrasound, and has remarkable temporal and spatial focusing properties at the intended receiver. In this paper we are applying it to radio waves and investigate the efficiency of time reversal in a specific simulated propagation environment where the transmitter and the receiver are separated by a slab of scatterers. This type of environment relates to the shower curtain effect, and we investigate the dependence on the distance of the communicating ends from the scatterers. We find that the dominant factor is the equivalent aperture of the antenna array as determined by the size of the scatterer group.