Peer-to-Peer Energy-Aware Tree Network Formation

We study the fundamental problem of distributed energy-aware network formation with mobile agents of limited computational power that have the capability to wirelessly transmit and receive energy in a peer-to-peer manner. Specifically, we design simple distributed protocols consisting of a small number of states and interaction rules for the construction of both arbitrary and binary trees. Further, we theoretically and experimentally evaluate a plethora of energy redistribution protocols that exploit different levels of knowledge in order to achieve desired energy distributions which require, for instance, that every agent has twice the energy of the agents of higher depth (according to the tree network). Our study shows that without using any knowledge about the network structure, such energy distributions cannot be achieved in a timely manner, which means that there might be high energy loss during the redistribution process. On the other hand, only a few extra bits of information seem to be enough to guarantee quick convergence to energy distributions that satisfy particular properties, yielding low energy loss.