Stochastic Collaborative Beamforming in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are composed of spatially distributed autonomous sensor devices, named motes. These devices are constituted by a microcontroller, sensors, and they have the ability to communicate in the ISM frequency band using the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. They have their own power supply, AA or AAA batteries, processing unit, sensors and wireless communications. Usually, the motes exchange packets using a multi-hop routing, and the maximum communication distance emitter-receiver is around 100m. At least one mote acts as a gateway, and the data gathered by the sensors of each mote have to be sent to this mote that is named sink or Base Station (BS). In a WSN the BS is within the area of the WSN in order to receive the information. The distance between the BS and the nearest mote must be at the most 100m to be able to receive the packets. If the BS distance is farther than this distance, the communication fails, because the motes have limited power. Some techniques are proposed to overcome this distance in order to achieve a long range communication to reach the BS, for instance to communicate to a low orbit satellite. The difficulties are related to synchronization errors in the clocks of the motes. We propose an alternative technique based in a collaborative beamforming scheme, named stochastic collaborative transmission or stochastic beamforming, in which we take advantage of the synchronization errors of the clocks to achieve a large gain in a limited number of trials.