Distributed Extremum Seeking and Cooperative Control for Mobile Communication

In this paper, the integrated control and optimization problem of mobile cooperative communication clusters is considered. Each communication channel is modeled by its Shannon capacity outage probability. Hence, connectivity is maintained if the outage probability is less than a certain threshold. The objective of the communication network is to not only maintain communication quality but also extend the coverage. An information theory based performance index is defined to quantify this control objective. Unlike most of the existing results, the proposed cooperative control design does not assume the knowledge of any gradient (of the performance index). Rather, a distributed extremum seeking cooperative control is designed to optimize the connectivity and coverage of each of mobile communication nodes by feeding back only the motion information of its neighboring nodes and by measuring the current performance of its communication channel(s). The proposed approach retains all the advantages of cooperative control (such as requiring only local feedback and tolerating switching topologies) and searches autonomously for the optimal spacings based on typical communication models. Simulation results demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed methodology.