Decentralized phase synchronization scheme for distributed beamforming in WSN with quantized phase feedback

In this paper, we propose a phase synchronization scheme for distributed beamforming in Wireless Sensor Networks. The scheme is decentralized, meaning that the Base Station (BS) is not required to coordinate the allocation of sensors to the corresponding training timeslots. The BS is only asked to perform an estimation and quantization of the signal phase in each timeslot, and send it as a feedback to the sensor nodes. In order to find the optimal number of training timeslots, we derive an upperbound of the resulting beamforming gain in this specific scenario. Computer simulation results are given in terms of achievable throughput for different number of sensors.