An approximate throughput evaluation of a Relay Function in Cooperative Multiple Robots System

Abstract

Robots with 3G/LTE capability can cooperate with others by using link-aggregation. When one needs to send an unexpectedly large dataset in high-bandwidth situations to a remote center office, a robot can distribute its data to other robots via IEEE802.11 WLAN. In previous research, a relay function was introduced to improve the performance in this system type. However, the relay function was only evaluated using a simple model due to computational complexity. Therefore, we propose a heuristic method for evaluating the relay function, which can simplify the computation. This method can reduce the computational complexity, and the relay function can obtain higher efficiency than direct communication.