Channel Capacity of Virtual MIMO-Based Wireless Sensor Networks with Imperfect CSI

In existing works on MIMO for wireless sensor networks, virtual MIMO schemes based on the space-time block codes (STBC) have been widely used, and it is demonstrated that the full diversity and full rate are achieved which enhances power/bandwidth efficiency and reliability. However, all the existing works have generated substantial insight into the applications of MIMO to wireless sensor networks design for certain simplified models of the communication environment, such as complete channel state information (CSI), absence of interference generated by other users in the network, and persistent, homogeneous traffic from the physical layer point of view. In this paper, the authors study channel capacity of virtual MIMO-based wireless sensor networks with imperfect CSI. The authors compare the channel capacities of using equal power allocation and water-filling strategy and consider different channel models with imperfect CSI.