Distributed beamforming for source localization in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely studied in a lot of areas recently. In this paper, we present a method to examine the validity of distributed beamforming for source location in WSNs, by considering the effect of position errors, element failure, and environment noise, which often occur in practice. Computer simulation results show that even though the three errors exist, the direction of a sensor can still be estimated through the beampattern based on distributed beamforming (BF). The benefit of the distributed BF is that almost no additional hardware is required, which guarantees the sensors to be small and low-cost.