Decentralized coordination of multi-agents requires that every agent reliably and efficiently disseminates its state to neighbours through a wireless network. If dissemination is unreliable, safety issues may ensue. Unfortunately, the broadcast service of wireless network is efficient but unreliable (e.g., IEEE 802.11). The Neighbourhood Monitoring Protocol (NMP) [1] is an efficient and scalable protocol that assures a reliable state dissemination between mobile agents, under some conditions of channel utilization. NMP runs on top of IEEE 802.11. In this paper we evaluate NMP with a specific decentralized collision avoidance algorithm based on the GRP policy [2]. The algorithm is particularly challenging because it accommodates an arbitrary number non-holonomic agents. We show that NMP allows the system to scale well and provides a very high state delivery ratio even if it operates on the unreliable broadcast service like 802.11. Doing so, NMP assures the correct state information to the collision avoidance algorithm.
['Gianluca Dini', 'Francesco Giurlanda', 'Lucia Pallotttino']
Neighbourhood monitoring for decentralised coordination in multi-agent systems: A case-study