Cooperative time-reversal communication in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we study the feasibility of using a technique called time reversal for cooperative communication on wireless sensor networks. An indoor environment containing multiple wireless sensors is used as an example in which to test and demonstrate this approach. Using numerical simulations, we study the behavior of the peak power received at a target sensor as a function of the number of cooperating transmitting sensors as well as the level of transmitted signal distortion and timing synchronization errors. The simulation results demonstrate that time reversal is an effective generalization of beamforming that provides an efficient basis for cooperative communication on broadband multipath channels.