On the impact of the propagation environment on controlled mobility algorithms

The usage of mobility in Wireless Networked Robotics (WNR) systems introduced a new design primitive and several potential advantages, especially when the mobility is completely controlled by the WNR devices. At the same time, mobility introduces a new source of energy consumption for the devices, which already have to deal with limited resources. Thus, a trade off between the advantages introduced by controlled mobility and the energy expenditure needs to be determined. In order to look for this trade off, a precise characterization of the environment where devices act and move needs to be introduced. An important part of this characterization regards the radio environment. In this paper, we investigate the role of the propagation model on the performance of 4 different controlled mobility schemes. Furthermore, we generalize the classical free space model in order to use it for a generic value of the path loss exponent. © 2012 IEEE.