Quorum sensing on mobile ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are an increasingly important networking paradigm that will be the backbone of important defense and first response networks. Group decision-making is key to these environments, but is made difficult when MANETs are introduced due to network disruptions, bandwidth limitations, and host mobility patterns. Results gathered using standard group decisionmaking algorithms can become inaccurate, time-insensitive, or computationally undecidable. This paper focuses on a group decisionmaking approach using agent-based quorum sensing (ABQS) on MANETs. A mobile agent collects information (e.g., votes) from each host on a network until it can make an informed decision about global preference. This agent exploits the inherent tradeoff between efficient vote collection and result accuracy in order to provide better results, when considering survivability, hosts visited, hops made, and time spent, with only a very slight drop in correctnessbenefits that greatly outweigh costs. Experimental evidence from live MANETs demonstrates the effectiveness of this solution.

Moving targets: collective decisions and flexible choices in house-hunting ants

“…Similarly, engineering research is profiting from and, to a certain extent, helping to drive advances in the understanding of collective decision-making. The house-hunting models mentioned above have already inspired the design of novel computer algorithms applicable to mobile ad hoc networks Cicirello et al 2005;Peysakhov et al 2006) and swarm robotics (Berman et al 2006;Berman et al 2007).…”

“…Such is the power and efficiency of this form of decision making that honey bees, for example, can select the best nest site even if news of it arrives late in the decision-making process (Seeley and Buhrman 1999; see also Britton et al 2002 for a mathematical model of this process). As with other social insect behaviors, house-hunting has also attracted the attention of engineers Cicirello et al 2005;Peysakhov et al 2006;Berman et al 2006Berman et al , 2007. In this paper, we will investigate experimentally if house-hunting T. albipennis ants can respond to new information that arrives late.…”

Industrial deployment of multi-agent technologies: review and selected case studies

“…The first problem relates closely the mobile ad-hoc networking (e.g., MANET [47]), bandwidth sharing and data streaming applications in commercial (e.g., telecommunication) and various military applications. Even though we are not aware of any such agent application available on the market, there are several applied-research and technologytransfer projects supported that provide preliminary results in this area, such as [13,63,94]. U.S. Army has been recently supporting the application oriented, demonstration research investigating the use of trust modeling and multi-agent reflection in the area of network security [66].…”

Collective unary decision-making by decentralized multiple-robot systems applied to the task-sequencing problem

“…Even simple bacteria are now known to employ quorum tests to regulate their collective behaviors (Miller and Bassler 2001;Waters and Bassler 2005). In Temnothorax ants, it appears that the individual ants estimate consensus via their rate of encounter with their teammates (Pratt 2005), and it is this strategy that we propose here with some modifications to better suit it to the somewhat different strengths and weaknesses of the simple mobile robots that often compose dec-MRS. Biologically inspired quorum testing has also been applied to ad-hoc networking problems by Peysakhov et al (2006).…”