Improving the Efficiency of Wireless Sensor Networks Through Signal Processing Techniques

The minimization of energy consumption in modern technology has become a crucial element of research in engineering it is not only advantageous to realizing versatile, robust designs, but also the demand of an environmentally-awakened society. In the case of wireless networking, discovering energy-efficient solutions is just as important to the practicality and success of the technology as it is to commercialization and public reception. In this paper, the authors show that a large portion of the beamforming gains can be realized even with imperfect synchronization corresponding to phase errors with reasonably large variance. They present a master-slave architecture where a designated master transmitter coordinates the synchronization of other (slave) transmitters for beamforming.