Trajectory control of mobile access points in MANET

Mobile access points with long range communication capability may be deployed in mobile ad hoc networks to bridge (e.g. via airborne units) network partitions. In this paper, we address the problem of continuously navigating mobile access points to proper locations within their respective partitions such that certain network performance metrics are optimized, and refer to this problem as trajectory control. We present several trajectory control algorithms with different assumptions on locationing capabilities to achieve the objectives of reducing hop count and reducing overhead. Our proposed algorithms are more practical than existing centralized algorithms and make fewer assumptions on locationing capabilities. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms