Connectivity Maintenance for High-Speed Communication with Adversarial Jamming
Thomas Kaminsky, Hammad Izhar, Daniel Garces, Collin Brady, Joe Rottner, Stephanie Gil
AI summary
Problem
Prior connectivity maintenance methods assume symmetric communication links, making them unable to handle the asymmetric signal degradation caused by adversarial jammers without severely restricting robot motion.
Approach
The authors introduce symmetrized control graphs that convert the asymmetric directed communication model into an undirected graph, enabling standard connectivity maintenance tools like Control Barrier Functions to guarantee a high-rate directed path.
Key results
- Formal definition of symmetrized control graphs preserving directed path guarantees
- Proof that undirected connectedness implies a valid high-rate directed channel
- CBF-based controller enforcing connectivity under jamming and node removal
- Simulation validation demonstrating superior trajectory flexibility over conservative baselines
Why it matters
Enables reliable, high-bandwidth robot networks for critical search-and-rescue and defense missions in contested environments.
Abstract
We consider the problem of adaptively controlling a fleet of robots to maintain a communication network in an adversarial environment. In particular, a network team of robots is tasked with maintaining a directed communication channel at some data rate γ from an independent task robot to a fixed base station, accommodating the task robot’s motion and adversarial intervention in the form of an omnidirectional jammer and network team robot removals. We utilize a physically-motivated model for directed signal strength between robots in the presence of a jammer, introducing asymmetry into communication which challenges connectivity maintenance approaches [1]. Our main contribution in this paper is the introduction of a strategy for translating this directed model into an undirected graph for which enforcing connectedness is sufficient for maintaining high-rate communication. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in simulation using a CBF-based controller, showing that our controller maintains a high-rate connection throughout diverse trajectories, even when more conservative controllers fail.