Distributed Beamforming in Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a large number of small sensor nodes that are densely deployed over an area to acquire information about targets of interest. These sensor nodes collaborate among themselves to form an ad-hoc net-work and disseminate the collected target information to an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The objective is then to increase the data rate and transmission range between the sensor nodes and the UAV. A distributed beamforming approach was pro-posed whereby the sensor nodes are grouped into clusters and their transmission are coordinated in order to form a distributed antenna array that directs a beam towards the UAV. A simulation model was developed and implemented in MATLAB pro-gramming language to study the effectiveness of beamforming using sensor clusters for establishing a communication link to the UAV. Results showed that the antenna main lobe remained relatively unchanged in the presence of position errors and sen-sor node failures or when the density of the sensor nodes changed. Additionally, the maximum average power gain of the main lobe can be increased by increasing the density of the sensor cluster, thereby increasing the transmission range between the sensor clusters and the UAV.