Fully wireless implementation of distributed beamforming on a software-defined radio platform

Abstract

We describe the key ideas behind our implementation of distributed beamforming on a GNU-radio based software-defined radio platform. Distributed beamforming is a cooperative transmission scheme whereby a number of nodes in a wireless network organize themselves into a virtual antenna array and focus their transmission in the direction of the intended receiver, potentially achieving orders of magnitude improvements in energy efficiency. This technique has been extensively studied over the past decade and its practical feasibility has been demonstrated in multiple experimental prototypes. Our contributions in the work reported in this paper are three-fold: (a) the first ever all-wireless implementation of distributed beamforming without any secondary wired channels for clock distribution or channel feedback, (b) a novel digital baseband approach to synchronization of high frequency RF signals that requires no hardware modifications, and (c) an implementation of distributed beam-forming on a standard, open platform that allows easy reuse and extension. We describe the design of our system in detail, present some initial results and discuss future directions for this work. © 2012 ACM.