Lifetime Improvement of Wireless Sensor Networks by Collaborative Beamforming and Cooperative Transmission

Abstract— Extending network lifetime of battery-operated devices is a key design issue that allows uninterrupted information exchange among distributive nodes in wireless sensor networks. Collaborative beamforming (CB) and cooperative transmission (CT) have recently emerged as new communication techniques that enable and leverage effective resource sharing among collaborative/cooperative nodes. In this paper, we seek to maximize the lifetime of sensor networks by using the new idea that closely located nodes can use CB/CT to reduce the load or even avoid packet forwarding requests to nodes that have critical battery life. First, we study the effectiveness of CB/CT to improve the signal strength at a faraway destination using energy in nearby nodes. Then, a 2D disk case is analyzed to assess the resulting performance improvement. For general networks, if information-generation rates are fixed, the new routing problem is formulated as a linear programming problem; otherwise, the cost ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICC
• Authors: Zhu Han, Harold Vincent Poor
• Keywords: Communications, Distributive Nodes, ICC 2007, Sensor Networks, Wireless Sensor Networks