Cooperative communication based on random beamforming strategy in wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a two-phase cooperative communication strategy and an optimal power allocation strategy to transmit sensor observations to a fusion center in a large-scale sensor network. Outage probability is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. Simulation results demonstrate that: 1) when signal-to-noise ratio is low, the performance of the proposed system is better than that of the multiple-input and multiple-output system over uncorrelated slow fading Rayleigh channels; 2) given the transmission rate and the total transmission SNR, there exists an optimal power allocation that minimizes the outage probability; 3) on correlated slow fading Rayleigh channels, channel correlation will degrade the system performance in linear proportion to the correlation level.