Leakage Based Beam Shaping for Cooperative Communication in MANETs

Using the concepts of phased arrays, cooperative communication in military MANETs has the potential to strongly increase the transmission range while reducing the probability of being detected by hostile units. However, due to the random placement of the nodes and their potentially large separation, the standard pattern synthesis tools cannot be applied or require large computational complexity. In this context, we propose leakage based beam shaping, a low complexity pattern synthesis approach which minimizes the leakage power in undesired directions while maintaining coherent addition in the desired direction. We discuss the resulting signal power - leakage power trade-off and carefully investigate its potential and practical feasibility in military MANETs.