Lifetime Improvement in Wireless Sensor Networks via Collaborative Beamforming and Cooperative Transmission

: Collaborative beamforming (CB) and cooperative transmission (CT) have recently emerged as communication techniques that can make effective use of collaborative/cooperative nodes to create a virtual multiple-input/multiple-output system. Extending the lifetime of networks composed of battery-operated nodes is a key issue in the design and operation of wireless sensor networks. The effects on network lifetime of allowing closely located nodes to use CB/CT to reduce the load or even to avoid packet-forwarding requests to nodes that have critical battery life are considered. First, the effectiveness of CB/CT in improving the signal strength at a faraway destination using energy in nearby nodes is studied. Then, the performance improvement obtained by this technique is analysed for a special 2D disc case. Further, for general networks in which information-generation rates are fixed, a new routing problem is formulated as a linearprogramming problem, whereas for other general networks, th...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Zhu Han, H. Vincent Poor
• Keywords: Battery-operated Nodes, CORR 2007, Education, General Networks, Wireless Sensor Networks