Cooperative Communication Based on Random Beamforming Strategy in Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cooperative communication strategy with random beamforming and optimal power allocation for large-scale wireless sensor networks, improving reliability especially at low SNR and analyzing effects of channel correlation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel two-phase cooperative communication method with optimal power allocation, enhancing performance over traditional MIMO systems in sensor networks.

Findings

Outperforms MIMO systems at low SNR on uncorrelated Rayleigh channels.

Identifies optimal power allocation to minimize outage probability.

Channel correlation degrades system performance proportionally.

Abstract

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.