Energy Optimal Distributed Beamforming Using Unmanned Vehicles

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a team of unmanned vehicles that are tasked with distributed transmit beamforming (virtual antenna array placement and design), in order to co-operatively transmit information to a remote station in realistic communication environments. We are interested in the energy-aware (both motion and communication energy) co-optimization of robotic paths and transmission powers for cooperative transmit beamforming under a reception quality requirement. We first consider the case where the channel is known. For this case, we propose an efficient approach for getting arbitrarily close to the optimum solution, which involves solving a series of multiple-choice knapsack problems. We then extend our analysis and methodology to the case where the channel is not known. The robots then probabilistically predict the channel at unvisited locations and integrate it with path planning and decision making for energy-aware distributed transmit beamforming. Finally, we extensively confirm our proposed approach with several simulation results with real channel parameters. Our results highlight the underlying trends of the optimum strategy and indicate considerable energy savings.