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 (MIMO) system. Extending the lifetime of networks composed of battery-operated nodes is a key issue in the design and operation of wireless sensor networks. This paper considers 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. 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 analyzed for a special 2D disk case. Further, for general networks in which information-generation rates are fixed, a new routing problem is formulated as a linear programming problem, while 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.Comment: Invited paper to appear in the IEE Proceedings: Microwaves, Antennas and Propagation, Special Issue on Antenna Systems and Propagation for Future Wireless Communication

Energy Efficiency in Multi-hop CDMA Networks: A Game Theoretic Analysis

A game-theoretic analysis is used to study the effects of receiver choice on the energy efficiency of multi-hop networks in which the nodes communicate using Direct-Sequence Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA). A Nash equilibrium of the game in which the network nodes can choose their receivers as well as their transmit powers to maximize the total number of bits they transmit per unit of energy is derived. The energy efficiencies resulting from the use of different linear multiuser receivers in this context are compared, looking at both the non-cooperative game and the Pareto optimal solution. For analytical ease, particular attention is paid to asymptotically large networks. Significant gains in energy efficiency are observed when multiuser receivers, particularly the linear minimum mean-square error (MMSE) receiver, are used instead of conventional matched filter receivers.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the Workshop on Multi-Layer Modelling and Design of Multi-Hop Wireless Networks (MLMD 06), Minneapolis, MN, July 12 - 15, 200

Capacity Region of Vector Gaussian Interference Channels with Generally Strong Interference

An interference channel is said to have strong interference if for all input distributions, the receivers can fully decode the interference. This definition of strong interference applies to discrete memoryless, scalar and vector Gaussian interference channels. However, there exist vector Gaussian interference channels that may not satisfy the strong interference condition but for which the capacity can still be achieved by jointly decoding the signal and the interference. This kind of interference is called generally strong interference. Sufficient conditions for a vector Gaussian interference channel to have generally strong interference are derived. The sum-rate capacity and the boundary points of the capacity region are also determined.Comment: 50 pages, 11 figures, submitted to IEEE trans. on Information Theor

Energy Harvesting Cooperative Networks: Is the Max-Min Criterion Still Diversity-Optimal?

This paper considers a general energy harvesting cooperative network with M source-destination (SD) pairs and one relay, where the relay schedules only m user pairs for transmissions. For the special case of m = 1, the addressed scheduling problem is equivalent to relay selection for the scenario with one SD pair and M relays. In conventional cooperative networks, the max-min selection criterion has been recognized as a diversity-optimal strategy for relay selection and user scheduling. The main contribution of this paper is to show that the use of the max-min criterion will result in loss of diversity gains in energy harvesting cooperative networks. Particularly when only a single user is scheduled, analytical results are developed to demonstrate that the diversity gain achieved by the max-min criterion is only (M+1)/2, much less than the maximal diversity gain M. The max-min criterion suffers this diversity loss because it does not reflect the fact that the source-relay channels are more important than the relay-destination channels in energy harvesting networks. Motivated by this fact, a few user scheduling approaches tailored to energy harvesting networks are developed and their performance is analyzed. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the accuracy of the developed analytical results and facilitate the performance comparison.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figure