Performance of Cooperative Time-Reversal Communication in a Mobile Wireless Environment

In this paper, we study the performance of a technique called time reversal for cooperative communication in a mobile wireless environment. To put the work in context, a brief introduction to time-reversal communication (TRC) in general and cooperative TRC in particular is presented. Performance of a proposed cooperative TRC scheme is evaluated numerically via a simulated indoor environment containing multiple wireless communication nodes. We characterize the behavior of the peak power received at a target node as a function of the number of cooperating transmitting nodes and as a function of the distance of the target from its predicted location within the simulated environment. The results demonstrate that the performance of cooperative TRC is less sensitive to uncertainty in the target position than might be expected from standard assumptions regarding the relationship between signal wavelength and spatial channel correlation in a complex multipath environment.