A Graph-Based Algorithm for Minimum Router Deployment

Recent advances in technology have led to robots with communication capability. These networked robots can provide a communication substrate by establishing a wireless network backbone. The wireless network is useful in many settings, such as urban search and rescue, fire fighting, military operations, and disaster response. Given a set of clients, such as fire-fighters, the network robots can establish a network backbone guaranteeing that all clients are connected. A fundamental problem is what is the minimal number of robots and where should they be placed to establish a network without any partition. In this work, we investigate the problem of calculating the position of the mobile networked robots so they can establish a communication backbone for a set of clients. We present a graph-based algorithm in order to calculate the position of the networked robots. The methodology was thoroughly evaluated through numerous trials considering different conditions, providing statistical examination of the final results. We compare our results with the Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm, which is useful as a standard algorithm for comparison. Our results show that our approach is correct and uses fewer robots.