Decentralized Coordination for Collaborative Beamforming in Mobile Wireless Networks

Research and development in mobile wireless networks has progressed to the point where coordinated operations are viable. Coordination at the wavelength level, while the most challenging, provides the greatest benefits with opportunities like distributed collaborative beamforming. Achieving distributed wireless coordination that wavelength level is a difficult challenge that has seen significant interest in recent years. In this paper, a decentralized approach to wireless wavelength-level coordination is discussed. Based on consensus averaging, the approach relies only on information gathered locally at each node in the array, and on local decision rules; no master node or global control is required. The approach is described, and recent examples of decentralized coordination of spatio-electrical states such as frequency, time, and location, are discussed.