Energy Efficient Distributed Beamforming with Sensor Selection in Wireless Sensor Networks

We study the energy efficiency for a wireless sensor network, in which multiple sensors having identical information cooperatively transmit signals to a fusion center. To facilitate the cooperation, we propose a transmission scheme consisting of four phases: channel state information acquisition phase, sensor selection phase, beamforming phase, and cooperative transmission phase. Analyses show that there is tradeoff between the energies for sensor selection plus beamforming phases and cooperative transmission phase in deciding the number of sensors to be selected. This observation is captured by numerical and simulation results, which can provide a design guideline for energy saving and prolonging of network lifetime.