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 linear- programming problem, whereas for other general networks, the cost for routing is dynamically adjusted according to the amount of energy remaining and the effectiveness of CB/CT. From the analysis and the simulation results, it is seen that the proposed method can reduce the payloads of energy-depleting nodes by about 90% in the special case network considered and improve the lifetimes of general networks by about 10%, compared with existing techniques.