Beaconing in MIMO Broadcast Channels

Abstract

There is a need to broadcast identical information to multiple users in a network. Examples include sending a beacon signal from an UAV to multiple sensors in a surveillance region and, in the context of ad hoc networks, multicasting. This paper studies the information theoretic aspects of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) beaconing where multiple antenna elements are available at the transmitter. A MAXMIN formulation is proposed to exploit the channel state information assumed to be available at the transmitter. A solution which applies linear programming is presented, along with numerical examples demonstrating the performance gain over the channel blind transmission scheme.