Time reversal for ant trails in wireless networks

Real-life ants use pheromone trails to guide themselves back and forth from food, without the help of a map. In this paper, we introduce a new protocol for wireless networks, called Time Reversal for Ant Trails (TRAT) which mimics ants by using electromagnetic virtual beacons generated by Time Reversal focusing instead of pheromones. Simulations show that for a given trajectory, the performance of the proposed scheme increases with the number of transmit antennas at the network side, with the precision of the scanning, and decreases with inter-beacon spacing and the carrier frequency.