Distributed Beamforming Techniques for Flexible Communications Networks

In this paper, we implement and demonstrate a distributed communications beamforming system that provides increased range, data rate, and robustness to interference. By treating two distributed, locally-coherent meshes as antenna arrays, with ${n_{{m_A}}}$ and ${n_{{m_B}}}$ elements respectively, we develop an approach that produces an $n_{{m_A}}^2{n_{{m_B}}}$ performance improvement in signal-to-noise ratio over a traditional single-antenna to single-antenna link in the absence of interference. We further demonstrate that in the presence of interference, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio improvement is significantly greater for a wide range of environments. We implement this system on a network of software-defined radios and demonstrate both simulated and experimental results both with and without interference.