DEPLOYMENT OF MOBILE ROUTERS ENSURING COVERAGE AND CONNECTIVITY

Maintaining connectivity among a group of autonomous agents exploring an area is very important, as itpromotes cooperation between the agents and also helps message exchanges which are very critical fortheir mission. Creating an underlying Ad-hoc Mobile Router Network (AMRoNet) using simple roboticrouters is an approach that facilitates communication between the agents without restricting theirmovements. We address the following question in our paper: How to create an AMRoNet with localinformation and with minimum number of routers? We propose two new localized and distributedalgorithms 1)agent-assisted router deployment and 2) a self-spreading for creating AMRoNet. Thealgorithms use a greedy deployment strategy for deploying routers effectively into the area maximizingcoverage and a triangular deployment strategy to connect different connected component of routers fromdifferent base stations. Empirical analysis shows that theproposed algorithms are the two bestlocalizedapproaches to create AMRoNets.