Comprehensive Analysis of Beampattern and Energy Consumption of Collaborative Beamforming Scheme in WSN

Communication reliability and energy efficiency of wireless sensor network (WSN) can be enhanced by utilizing collaborative beamforming (CB) through collaboration of several sensor nodes to form a virtual antenna array (VAA). This study proposes a CB scheme that selects optimal sensor nodes based on uniform and sparse array of linear and circular array. The sparse array is obtained by optimizing the inter-element spacing of array using Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA). The amplitude weight of the selected nodes is also optimized by ICA to further reduce peak sidelobe level (PSL) and size of the main lobe. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed by evaluating the beampattern properties of different number of optimized sensor nodes. Besides, the energy consumption is also evaluated with different number of optimized sensor nodes and communication radius. The results show that the PSL of beampattern yield by the sensor nodes with amplitude weight optimization is improved by 20% than the sensor nodes with uniform amplitude weight. Index Terms—Wireless sensor networks, collaborative beamforming, metaheuristic algorithms