Backbone-based connectivity control for mobile networks

While a network of autonomous mobile agents is capable of performing spatially distributed tasks, communication between agents imposes a class of constraints over the corresponding task. This paper proposes a distributed paradigm to deal with a critical communication constraint, connectedness constraint, where a group of mobile agents are required to remain connected while performing a task (e.g., formation control, consensus, etc.). The proposed method adaptively extracts communication backbone of the group, which is formed by a subset of agents, and thus partitions the group into backbone agents and non-backbone agents. The connectedness of the system is maintained at two levels: motion of backbone agents is controlled to maintain existing connections in the backbone; motion of non-backbone agents is determined via a leader-follower formation control method with backbone agents as the leaders. Key advantages of the proposed approach are that it can deal with arbitrary system topologies, it is a distributed method, it uses only two-hop neighbor information, and has low communication cost.