Autonomous location of mobile wireless relay nodes

We consider the problems of placing or routing the movement of mobile unmanned aircraft for wirelessly relaying traffic, with the goal of enabling the maximum possible bitrate between any pair of clients. We first formalize this as a problem of placing a specified number of relay nodes to create a spanning network that minimizes the maximum link length, and show that approximating the optimum is a hard problem. We then propose an algorithm that autonomous mobile relays can employ to self-organize into such a spanning network, and describe its performance, proving that each round of the algorithm improves the link lengths. We finish with a brief description of an implementation on quad-copters.