Location control for information dissemination

The paper investigates location control for information dissemination, building on our previous work [1] on coverage with information aggregation. In this scenario, information generated in the area needs to be communicated to multiple destinations. The area is partitioned into subregions within which only one node provides service. The main contribution of this work is an algorithm for optimal placement of the nodes. We define the information dissemination density function over the area that combines information generating and information receiving densities. Subsequently, we show that the cost of information dissemination only explicitly depends on information generating and receiving density. Finding the optimal node location for information dissemination is formalized by an optimization problem with respect to the partition of the area and location of all nodes. We analyze the optimality conditions for both the partition and location and explicitly derive the optimal location for all nodes given any partition of the area. We also design a distributed iterative motion control algorithm in discrete time that drives all nodes to an optimal service configuration from any arbitrary initial configuration. We prove that under our control algorithm, the cost function decreases along iterations and converges to a local minimum. Numerical simulations that demonstrate the effectiveness of our motion control algorithm are also provided.