High-fidelity radio communications modeling for multi-robot simulation

Abstract

This paper describes a high-fidelity model of wireless propagation that integrates several existing models from the wireless communications literature. The model accounts for environmental features, including fading (large and small-scale, and multipath), link-layer models, and interference between radios. In addition to identification and integration of the complementary communication components, this paper's contribution is in demonstrating how discretization, approximation and batch pre-calculation allow the complete model to remain practicable for real-time robot simulation. The faithfulness of the simulated communications is assessed by showing how important qualitative aspects of the communication behavior are reproduced.