Optimality properties and performance analysis of co-operative time-reversal communication in wireless sensor networks

The properties and performance of a technique, called time reversal, for co-operative communication on power-constrained wireless sensor networks are studied. A brief discussion of the optimality properties of this approach is presented, and performance is studied experimentally via a simulated indoor environment containing multiple wireless sensors. Using numerical simulation, the behaviour of the peak power received at a target sensor as a function of the number of co-operating transmitting sensors as well as the level of transmitted signal distortion and timing synchronisation errors, is studied. The simulation results demonstrate that, subject to some rather stringent synchronisation requirements, time reversal is an effective generalisation of beamforming that provides an efficient basis for co-operative communication on broadband multipath channels