— In wireless ad hoc networks, distributed nodes can collaboratively form an antenna array for long-distance communications to achieve high energy efficiency. In recent work, Ochiai, et al., have shown that such collaborative beamforming can achieve a statistically nice beampattern with a narrow main lobe and low side lobes. However, the process of collaboration introduces significant delay, since all collaborating nodes need access to the same information. In this paper, a technique that significantly reduces the collaboration overhead is proposed. It consists of two phases. In the first phase, nodes transmit locally in a random access fashion. Collisions, when they occur, are viewed as linear mixtures of the collided packets. In the second phase, a set of cooperating nodes acts as a distributed antenna system and beamform the received analog waveform to one or more faraway destinations. This step requires multiplication of the received analog waveform by a complex number, which...
Athina P. Petropulu, Lun Dong, H. Vincent Poor