Optimizing network topology to reduce aggregate traffic in a system of mobile robots under an energy constraint

Autonomous mobile robots, such as unmanned aerial or ground vehicles, will play important roles in future military and commercial applications. Future systems will require the robots to communicate with each other on a peer-to-peer basis over a wireless link and are able to form a networked system such as an ad hoc network. In this paper, we consider a problem of optimizing the topology of the network for such systems. Our solution consists of two steps. We first develop a novel method to select a network tree topology from arbitrary initial connected network topology. Second, we develop a new optimization algorithm to reconfigure the network, starting from the tree found in the first step, while maintaining the connectivity to minimize the aggregate traffic under the constraints on the total number of hops that the mobile robots may move. We present simulation results to compare the performance of our algorithms.