In this paper, we study the feasibility of using a technique called time reversal for cooperative communication on wireless sensor networks. An indoor environment containing multiple wireless sensors is used as an example in which to test and demonstrate this approach. Using numerical simulations, we study the behavior of the peak power received at a target sensor as a function of the number of cooperating transmitting sensors as well as the level of transmitted signal distortion and timing synchronization errors. The simulation results demonstrate that time reversal is an effective generalization of beamforming that provides an efficient basis for cooperative communication on broadband multipath channels.

In this paper, we study the performance of a technique called time reversal for cooperative communication in a mobile wireless environment. To put the work in context, a brief introduction to timereversal communication (TRC) in general and cooperative TRC in particular is presented. Performance of a proposed cooperative TRC scheme is evaluated numerically via a simulated indoor environment containing multiple wireless communication nodes. We characterize the behavior of the peak power received at a target node as a function of the number of cooperating transmitting nodes and as a function of the distance of the target from its predicted location within the simulated environment.The results demonstrate that the performance of cooperative TRC is less sensitive to uncertainty in the target position than might be expected from standard assumptions regarding the relationship between signal wavelength and spatial channel correlation in a complex multipath environment.

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