Towards Controllability of Wireless Network Quality using Mobile Robotic Routers

We consider a problem of robotic router placement and mobility control with the objective of formation and maintenance of an optimal communication network between a set of transmitter-receiver pairs. In this scenario, the communication path between any transmitter-receiver pair contains a predetermined set of mobile robotic routers nodes. The goal of this work is to design an algorithm to optimize the positions of the robotic nodes to improve the overall performance of the network. We define the optimization metric to be the minimum of the Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratios (SINR) over all the links. In this manuscript, we propose two optimization algorithms to solve this problem in a centralized and a decentralized manner, respectively. We also demonstrate the performances of both algorithms based on a set of simulation experiments.