Commbots: Distributed control of mobile communication relays

Digital wireless communication networks are vital in modern life. However, these networks rely on centralized infrastr ucture that is extremely vulnerable to disaster or attack. We s eek to improve the communication environment in post-disaster scenarios by developing groups of mobile communication relay robots, or commbots, that can be deployed to replace damaged infrastructure. The job of a commbot is to position itself so as to maximize overall network performance, which presents a rich and complex distributed learning and control problem. We have implemented three distributed algorithms and have tested them in simulation on a variety of instances of the commbots problem. We present results from these simulations and compare and contrast the different approaches.

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