Patent ID: 7215924

Claim:
A method of supporting inductive communications among multiple transceivers, the method comprising: sharing a wireless bandwidth to sunnort bidirectional communications between pairs selected from at least three transceivers, the at least three transceivers including a base transceiver and at least two remote transceivers with which the base transceiver communicates, the at least two remote transceivers being assigned use of one or more time slots to communicate within a communication cycle; disposing at least two transducer elements in the base transceiver and at least one transducer element in each of the at least two remote transceivers to support inductive communications between the transceivers at any angular orientation relative to each other within a range of distance; comparing link qualities of communications between different transmit-receive transducer elements for each remote transceiver communicating with the base transceiver; selecting transmit-receive pairs of transducer elements to support further communications in respective time slots between the base transceiver and the at least two remote transceivers based on detected link quality; generating a signal from a selected transducer element of the at least two transducer elements in the base transceiver; and simultaneously receiving the signal on the at least two remote transceivers to compare link qualities of different transducer element pairs.