Autonomous enhancement of disruption tolerant networks

Mobile robots have successfully solved many real world problems. In the following we present the use of mobile robots to address the novel and challenging problem of providing disruption tolerant network service. In disruption tolerant networks, all messages are transported by the physical motion of participants in the network. When these movements do not meet the service demands of the network, network performance can only be improved by adding robots that provide additional network service. The task of controlling such robots is a problem that is NP-Hard. To develop an approximate solution, we propose a nullspace-based algorithm for controlling the motion of the added robots. This controller simultaneously optimizes multiple network performance metrics. Experiments that simulate the addition of robots to a real-world disruption tolerant network show that the introduction of mobile robots running our control scheme can significantly improve the performance and service guarantees of a disruption tolerant network.