Trajectory based communication in an ad hoc network of robots

Controlling node mobility to improve communication performance is a capability that the ad hoc networking community begins to investigate. In this paper, we propose to use this possibility to ensure communication in a sparse wireless ad hoc network whose elements are mobile robots. In such a network, the elements are usually disconnected and thus, movements of robots are used to asynchronously forward messages. To communicate efficiently, we propose a controlled scheduling of the movements together with a routing algorithm. We prove that the scheduling is deadlock free and that it insures communication between any pair of robots. Then, the scheduling is enhanced and modified in order to support fault tolerance. We also describe some implementations showing the usability of our approach.