Collaborative Beamforming Under Localization Errors: A Discrete Optimization Approach

We consider a network of agents that locate themselves in an environment through sensor measurements and aim to transmit a message signal to a base station via collaborative beamforming. The agents' sensor measurements result in localization errors, which degrade the quality of service at the base station due to unknown phase offsets that arise in the agents' communication channels. Assuming that each agent's localization error follows a Gaussian distribution, we study the problem of forming a reliable communication link between the agents and the base station despite the localization errors. In particular, we formulate a discrete optimization problem to choose only a subset of agents to transmit the message signal so that the variance of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) received by the base station is minimized while the expected SNR exceeds a desired threshold. When the variances of the localization errors are below a certain threshold characterized in terms of the carrier frequency, we show that greedy algorithms can be used to globally minimize the variance of the received SNR. On the other hand, when some agents have localization errors with large variances, we show that the variance of the received SNR can be locally minimized by exploiting the supermodularity of the mean and variance of the received SNR. In numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithms have the potential to synthesize beamformers orders of magnitude faster than convex optimization-based approaches while achieving comparable performances using less number of agents.