Virtual MIMO and distributed signal processing for sensor networks - an integrated approach

This paper proposes an effective sensor data transmission approach where virtual implementation of multiple input multiple output (V-MIMO) cooperative communication is judiciously integrated with joint distributed compression and recursive least squares (RLS) based adaptive signal processing. Both space-time block codes (STBC) and Vertical Bell Laboratories layered space time (V-BLAST) architecture are considered for energy efficient virtual MIMO implementations. The energy efficiency of the integrated system is analyzed for different transmission distances and channel conditions. The numerical results show that, beyond certain transmission distance thresholds, the proposed integrated scheme offers significant energy efficiency compared to previously proposed systems. We also show that this integrated approach is very effective in highly correlated multimedia data based wireless sensor networks. In particular, it can be ideal for networks based on prioritized transmission of wavelet transformed image and video data.