01669nas a2200145 4500008003900000245009700039210006900136520109600205653002101301653001301322100001201335700001801347700001901365856013901384 2011 d00aNeighbourhood Monitoring for Decentralised Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems: A Case-Study0 aNeighbourhood Monitoring for Decentralised Coordination in Multi3 a

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.

10aEmbedded Control10aRobotics1 aDini, G1 aGiurlanda, F.1 aPallottino, L. uhttp://www.centropiaggio.unipi.it/publications/neighbourhood-monitoring-decentralised-coordination-multi-agent-systems-case-study.html