An empirical analysis for evaluating the link quality of robotic sensor networks

This paper presents a comprehensive metric to evaluate the link quality for the distributed control of robotic swarms to maintain the communication links. The mobile robots dynamically reconfigure themselves to maintain reliable end-to-end communication links. Such applications require online measurements of communication link quality in real-time and require a connection between link quality and robot positions. In this paper, we present the empirical results and analysis of a link variability study for an indoor and outdoor environments including received signal strength indicator(RSSI), active throughput and packet loss rate(PLR) using the off-the-shelf software and hardware. RSSI is adpoted to reflect the basic performance of link quality in robotic sensor networks. Throughput acting as a decaying threshold generator is used to estimate the critical point for smooth and stable communication. Meanwhile, The metric PLR is adopted to reckon the cut-off point in end-to-end communication. The assessment of link quality acts as a feedback for cooperative control of mobile robots. The experimental results have shown the effectiveness of evaluation for the link quality of robotic sensor networks.