Communication network challenges for collaborative vehicles

Networked systems of autonomous mobile agents have emerged in a variety of applications such as collaborative robotics, unmanned aerial/ground vehicles, mobile sensor networks and disaster relief operations. These agents utilize wireless communications for distributed computing, control and decision-making. Due to their limitations on energy supply, design and implementation of efficient distributed algorithms are crucial for these systems. This paper reviews different design aspects of networks of collaborative vehicles. We survey existing methods of addressing physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layer, routing, and geometric connectivity issues for such networks and show limitations of these designs that address only single layer issues. We argue that a system engineering framework is needed for the design of such systems.