Minimizing network interference through mobility control in wireless robotic networks

In this paper, we treat mobility as a network control primitive in wireless robotic networks (WRNs), which consist of a number of mobile robots. The aim is to achieve better communication performance by making use of the mobility of the robots. In the literature, it has been shown that for a graph-based connectivity model, an equal-space configuration of robot nodes is optimal in terms of energy efficiency. To be more realistic, we adopt a signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR)-based physical model in this work. With this model, we show that the equal-space configuration of robots is no longer optimal from the perspective of network interference. Instead, an equal-SINR configuration of robots is demonstrated to be optimal for a unicast topology in WRNs. Based on our network interference reduction method, a distributed mobility control algorithm is proposed to achieve the equal-SINR configuration. Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm can drive robots to the desired positions where the network interference is minimized.