Controlling the Mobility of Network Nodes using Decentralized Extremum Seeking

A decentralized mobility control scheme, using extremum seeking methods, is presented that forms a linked chain of mobile relays, having nonholonomic constraints, that maximizes the total link bandwidth. The factors that determine the final arrangement are numerous and hard to model and predict in real time. Thus controlling the mobile nodes by position alone to form a linked communication chain is not adequate. Instead, an extremum seeking algorithm is used to drive the location of the relay to an optimal place by maximizing a performance function of the received signal-to-noise power ratios of immediate neighbors. A unique application of the ES algorithm is presented where the dither signal that drives the gradient estimation is derived from the motion of mobile relay orbiting about a virtual center point