Dynamic Recovery of Wireless Multi-Hop Infrastructure With the Autonomous Mobile Base Station

Wireless multihop infrastructures (WMIs) are promising network platforms that facilitate applications, such as smart cities, emergency responses, and outdoor events. WMIs can allow coverage over large areas with low setup and maintenance overheads. However, WMIs may be susceptible to loss of network connectivity caused by node damage or energy depletion. The end-to-end reachability is essential for the WMI to provide network service to users. This paper studies the problem of network self-recovery to sustain reachability in a WMI network by utilizing autonomous mobile base stations (MBSs). It is assumed that MBS is able to move to and pause or stop at positions in the network area. An MBS could be a self-driving robotic vehicle, or vehicle driven directly or remotely by a human. The proposed MBS approach, MBS-Fit, is a distributed and packet-interaction-based mechanism that allows MBS to automatically construct new routes, assess, and adaptively respond to the fitness of pause positions, such that MBS can provide links to recover the disconnected WMIs. We adopt packet-level evaluation to study the automatic interactions of MBS with the static WMI objects. In particular, the network reachability is measured by the amount of packets successfully delivered from users to the gateway through the WMI. Simulation results reveal that the proposed MBS-Fit approach achieves up to 30% improvement of network reachability in terms of successfully packet delivery compared with the conventional MBS. MBS-Fit mechanism also enables up to 80% improvement in terms of number of packets forwarded at MBS.