Energy Aware Architecture for Coordinated Mobility: An Approximate Dynamic Programming Approach

TL;DR

This paper develops distributed, energy-aware strategies for mobile agents to optimize communication link establishment, balancing mobility and communication costs with real-time feasible approximate dynamic programming methods.

Contribution

It introduces novel suboptimal policies based on approximate dynamic programming for energy-efficient coordination, with performance guarantees and practical simulation comparisons.

Findings

Proposed policies achieve near-optimal energy efficiency.

Performance bounds are established for the suboptimal strategies.

Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the approaches.

Abstract

Our goal is to design distributed coordination strategies that enable agents to achieve global performance guarantees while minimizing the energy cost of their actions with an emphasis on feasibility for real-time implementation. As a motivating scenario that illustrates the importance of introducing energy awareness at the agent level, we consider a team of mobile nodes that are assigned the task of establishing a communication link between two base stations with minimum energy consumption. We formulate this problem as a dynamic program in which the total cost of each agent is the sum of both mobility and communication costs. To ensure that the solution is distributed and real time implementable, we propose multiple suboptimal policies based on the concepts of approximate dynamic programming. To provide performance guarantees, we compute upper bounds on the performance gap between the proposed suboptimal policies and the global optimal policy. Finally, we discuss merits and demerits of the proposed policies and compare their performance using simulations.