A Fast Formation Flocking Scheme for a Group of Interactive Distributed Mobile Nodes in Autonomous Networks

Ubi-Com promises to provide a diversity of services at anytime and anyplace. The mobile nodes are envisioned to cooperate freely and move on a plane with the help of the efficient control and distributed coordination strategies. To achieve this goal, mobile nodes group communications in Ubi-Com is becoming increasing important and challenging. In this paper, we focus on the formation flocking in a group of autonomous mobile nodes. In the scenario, there are two kinds of nodes: the leader node and the follower nodes. The follower nodes are required to follow the leader node wherever it goes (following), while keeping a particular formation they are given in input (flocking). A novel scheme is proposed on the basis of the relative motion theory. Extensive theoretical analysis and simulation results have demonstrated that this scheme provides the follower nodes an efficient and timely method to follow the leader with the shortest path and the shortest time. In addition, the reported scheme is scalable in the sense that the processing load in each node is not increasing with more nodes in a group.