Cooperative Time-Reversal Communication is Order-Optimal for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks
Richard James Barton, Rong Zheng · 2006
Data gathering is one of the most important services provided by wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The predominant traffic pattern in data gathering services is many-to-one communication. Hence, it is critical to understand the limitations of many-to-one information flows and devise efficient data aggregation protocols to support prolonged operations in WSNs. In this paper, we demonstrate that a data aggregation rate of p(logn/n) is optimal and that this rate can be achieved using a generalization of cooperative beam forming called cooperative time-reversal communication. In contrast, the non-cooperative multihop relay strategies widely adopted in the literature are shown to be suboptimal in both capacity and network lifetime