Cooperative beamforming for multi-hop relaying in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we present a class of cooperative beamforming algorithms for information relaying in wireless multihop sensor networks. We focus on networks whereby the source is communicating to the destination via a set of multihop relay nodes organized via hierarchical clustering. In particular, at each hop, a set of clusters are formed using a number of relay nodes where for each cluster, the relay nodes employ two different relaying strategies: i) amplify-and-forward via beamforming, ii) decode-and-forward via beamforming. For both strategies, we present algorithms that systematically select the beamforming weights for the relays at each cluster that optimize the uncoded bit error rates at the destination.