Mitigating Multi-path Fading in a Mobile Mesh Network

Citation:

Marcos A. M. Vieira, Matthew E. Taylor, Prateek Tandon Manish Jain, Ramesh Govindan, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, and Milind Tambe. 2011. “Mitigating Multi-path Fading in a Mobile Mesh Network.” In Ad-Hoc Networks.

Abstract:

By using robots as routers, a team of networked robots can provide a communication substrate to establish a wireless mesh network. The mobile mesh network can autonomously optimize its configuration, increasing performance. One of the main sources of radio signal fading in such a network is multi-path propagation, which can be mitigated by moving the senders or the receivers on the distance of the order of a wavelength. In this paper, we measure the performance gain when robots are allowed to make such small movements and find that it may be as much as 270%. Our main contribution is the design of a system that allows robots to cooperate and improve the real-world network throughput via a practical solution. We model the problem of which robots to move as a distributed constraint optimization problem (DCOP). Our study includes four local metrics to estimate global throughput.
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