A Correlated Data-Driven Collaborative Beamforming Approach for Energy-Efficient IoT Data Transmission

An expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) has led to significant challenges in wireless data harvesting, dissemination, and energy management due to the massive volumes of data generated by IoT devices. These challenges are exacerbated by data redundancy arising from spatial and temporal correlations. To address these issues, this article proposes a novel data-driven collaborative beamforming (CB)-based communication framework for IoT networks. Specifically, the framework integrates CB with an overlap-based multihop routing protocol (OMRP) to enhance data transmission efficiency while mitigating energy consumption and addressing hot spot issues in remotely deployed IoT networks. Based on the data aggregation to a specific node by OMRP, we formulate a node selection problem for the CB stage, with the objective of optimizing uplink transmission energy consumption. Given the complexity of the problem, we introduce a softmax-based proximal policy optimization with long-short-term memory (SoftPPO-LSTM) algorithm to intelligently select CB nodes for improving transmission efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed OMRP improves network lifetime by 17% compared to benchmark routing protocols, while the SoftPPO-LSTM method for CB node selection achieves an 8.3% increase in throughput over benchmark algorithms. The results also reveal that the combined OMRP with the SoftPPO-LSTM method effectively mitigates hot spot problems and offers superior performance compared to traditional strategies.