Using robot mobility to exploit multipath fading

Abstract

Communication-aware motion control allows mobile networked robots to increase the average communication throughput. We exploit that in a multipath fading channel, robots can measure the SNR and adapt their motion to spend slightly more time at positions where the channel is good. Two new such cross-layer strategies are analyzed and evaluated: periodic stopping, where the stop duration is a function of the SNR, and controlled stopping, where the robot stops when the communication buffer is filling up. It is shown that the expected average channel capacity can be twice as high as when no cross-layer information is utilized. Experimental evaluation of the strategies confirms the theoretical results.