Using mobility for increasing the energy efficiency of multihop communications

Mobile robots equipped with cameras and sensors produce large amounts of data, which needs to be transferred energy-efficiently due to battery limitations. While most literature focuses on heterogeneous ad-hoc sensor networks, we use controlled robot mobility to reduce the energy cost per successfully transferred bit over a multihop link. In particular, we analyze the trade-off between hopping and movement cost. Our main conclusion is that, according to the parameters of the network, either the most efficient solution for large link distances is single hop with mobility or multiple hops without mobility. Interestingly, a combination of both do not provide important energy savings.