Distributed Transmit Beamforming Using Feedback Control

The concept of distributed transmit beamforming is implicit in many key results of network information theory. However, its implementation in a wireless network involves the fundamental challenge of ensuring phase coherence of the radio frequency signals from the different transmitters in the presence of unknown phase offsets between the transmitters and unknown channel gains from the transmitters to the receiver. In this paper, it is shown that such phase alignment can be achieved using distributed adaptation by the transmitters with minimal feedback from the receiver. Specifically, each transmitter independently makes a small random adjustment to its phase at each iteration, while the receiver broadcasts a single bit of feedback, indicating whether the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improved or worsened after the current iteration. The transmitters keep the ¿good¿ phase adjustments and discard the ¿bad¿ ones, thus implementing a distributed ascent algorithm. It is shown that, for a broad class of distributions for the random phase adjustments, this procedure leads to asymptotic phase coherence with probability one. A simple analytical model, borrowing ideas from statistical mechanics, is used to characterize the progress of the algorithm, and to provide guidance on parameter choices. This analytical model is based on a conjecture on the distribution of the received phases when the number of transmitters becomes large. Finally, the proposed system is shown to be scalable: the random phase perturbations can be chosen such that the convergence time is linear in the number of collaborating nodes.