Receding Horizon Control on the Broadcast of Information in Stochastic Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a receding horizon control approach for managing information broadcast in stochastic robot networks, addressing unreliable communication links caused by environmental factors and robot movements.

Contribution

It models information broadcast as a stochastic process and develops a control strategy to optimize broadcast timing and resource allocation in uncertain networks.

Findings

Effective control of broadcast statistics achieved

Expected broadcast time can be computed

Numerical examples validate the approach

Abstract

This paper focuses on the broadcast of information on robot networks with stochastic network interconnection topologies. Problematic communication networks are almost unavoidable in areas where we wish to deploy multi-robotic systems, usually due to a lack of environmental consistency, accessibility, and structure. We tackle this problem by modeling the broadcast of information in a multi-robot communication network as a stochastic process with random arrival times, which can be produced by irregular robot movements, wireless attenuation, and other environmental factors. Using this model, we provide and analyze a receding horizon control strategy to control the statistics of the information broadcast. The resulting strategy compels the robots to re-direct their communication resources to different neighbors according to the current propagation process to fulfill global broadcast requirements. Based on this method, we provide an approach to compute the expected time to broadcast the message to all nodes. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the results.