Design and Experimental Evaluation of Wi-Fi Mesh Architectures for Robust Multi-Robot Communication in Riverine Monitoring
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Environmental pollution and climate change present critical challenges to global sus- tainable development, underscoring the urgent need to protect riverine ecosystems that support vital biodiversity. While Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) offer an ad- vanced approach to continuous river monitoring, their deployment is constrained by communication reliability. Unmanned aerial, ground, and surface platforms must exchange control, telemetry, and high-volume sensor data in environments across infrastructure-less corridors plagued by vegetative shadowing, NLOS conditions, and dynamic topology changes. This thesis investigates whether commercial Wi-Fi mesh architectures can meet the stringent communication requirements of multi-robot riverine monitoring.
The work designs and implements a practical communication testbed using MikroTik Groove A52 mesh nodes, Robonode-M mesh modules, and Ubiquiti P2P links. The system is evaluated through different scenarios: mobility, distance, LOS, NLOS, frequency band, and QoS experiments. Network level performance is measured using latency, throughput, packet loss, RSSI, jitter, forwarding behavior and link recovery. The evaluation is further extended to application level robotic validation by transmitting ROS sensor topics, including Livox LiDAR point clouds, RealSense colour images, and ZED 4K camera streams.
The results show that Wi-Fi mesh architectures provide useful connectivity, con- tinuity under mobility and topology changes, making them suitable for riverine monitoring where maintaining communication for coordination is more important than maximizing peak throughput. MikroTik provides lower latency and more sta- ble moderate range performance, while Robonode offers longer range and more dy- namic mesh behavior but suffers from higher latency and lower application layer throughput. Apart from these, Ubiquiti P2P links achieve the best performance in transmitting high bandwidth sensor data, but are less flexible under mobility and obstruction. Overall, Wi-Fi mesh architecture satisfies riverine monitoring require- ments. The findings further supports a hybrid design in which mesh networking pro- vides mobile local access and topology resilience, while P2P backhaul supports high bandwidth sensor data transfer. Based on these findings, this research contributes a reproducible experimental benchmark and practical deployment guidelines for Wi-Fi mesh-based communication in riverine multi-robot monitoring systems.