Estimation of communication signal strength in robotic networks

In this paper we consider estimating the spatial variations of a wireless channel based on a small number of measurements in a robotic network. We use a multi-scale probabilistic model in order to characterize the channel and develop an estimator based on this model. We show that our model-based approach can estimate the channel well for several scenarios, with only a small number of gathered measurements. We furthermore consider a sparsity-based channel estimation approach, in which we utilize the compressibility of the channel in the frequency domain. Our results show that this approach can also be effective in several scenarios. We then discuss the underlying tradeoffs between the two approaches. For the model-based approach, we show the impact of the error in the underlying model as well as the error in the estimation of the parameters of the model on the overall performance. For the sparsity-based approach, we show the impact of channel compressibility on the performance. Overall, the proposed framework can be utilized for communication-aware motion planning in robotic networks, where a prediction of the link qualities is needed.