AD-NEMO: adaptive dynamic network expansion with mobile robots

Abstract

Consider a situation in which a mobile wireless user needs connectivity to the Internet. One such situation arises in battlefield or at disaster recovery site where it may not be feasible to set up a fixed network. An alternative solution to this problem is to send out a team of mobile robots to establish and maintain the connection between the user and an established network that is connected to the Internet. This includes the possibility of sending out new robots to join the team as needed, when the user moves beyond the range of the existing team, or if the signal becomes degraded for some reason. In this paper we propose a framework called AD-NEMO (Adaptive Dynamic Network Expansion with Mobile rObots) where the mobile robots will create a dynamic and adaptive ad-hoc network to provide connectivity to the mobile user. We have developed a prototype of our solution with actual hardware to study the feasibility of our solution.