Analysis of beamforming for improving the energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks with metaheuristics

摘要

Distributed beamforming in a wireless sensor network (WSN) allows the sensor nodes to reduce the energy required to perform wireless communications, a critical issue to prolong the lifetime of this kind of systems, in which the node energy is supplied by limited sources such as batteries. This works analyzes the effect of the dimensionality in the problem instances to accomplish an efficient distributed beamforming, taking into account two separate factors: the number of sensor nodes involved in the beamforming and the type of antenna these nodes have installed. By using both classic and state-of-the-art metaheuristics, a thorough set of experiments have been performed, showing that, given the antenna type, the number of nodes makes the beamforming problem become harder because of the required synchronism. The results have also shown that beamforming is an effective technique to increase the WSN lifetime.