A co-operative beamforming solution for eliminating multi-hop communications in wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes a new system architecture for continuous monitoring wireless sensor networks, utilizing recent developments in the areas of cooperative beam-forming, radio frequency integrated circuit technology, and spread-spectrum techniques. In the proposed system, nodes are activated only when they are triggered to send their own data to the fusion center directly, without burdening the network with MAC layer collisions and energy-consuming routing algorithms, thus guaranteeing long lifetime cycles. The nodes consist of a simple active reflector circuit which is synchronized by an incident wave transmitted by a distant base station. Since the nodes can be deployed in large numbers, the network acts as a single antenna array with high directive gain pointing towards the direction of the fusion center. At the receiver, data from each node can be de-multiplexed with the use of a frequency shift keying direct sequence spread spectrum modulation scheme that enables multiple access without destroying the beamforming characteristics of the network.