A Decentralized Control Algorithm for Maintaining Communication Links in Mobile Sensor Networks

This paper presents a distributed control algorithm for mobile nodes cooperating so as to dynamically reconfigure themselves to maintain reliable end-to-end communication links. A Delaunay trianglation based network model is proposed for describing the multi-robot system. The improved adjacency matrix is adopted to denote connection relationship of the one-hop neighboring nodes. Inspired by potential field and virtual force technology, the performace index implying virtual energy of individual node is proved to be globally convergent. Meanwhile, an algorithm named minimum-following is proposed for tethering of mobile team. The experimental results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed network model and tethering program.