Using organization knowledge to improve routing performance in wireless multi-agent networks

Multi-agent systems benefit greatly from an organization design that guides agents in determining when to communicate, how often, with whom, with what priority, and so on. However, this same organization knowledge is not utilized by general-purpose wireless network routing algorithms normally used to support agent communication. We show that incorporating organization knowledge (otherwise available only to the application layer) in the network-layer routing algorithm increases bandwidth available at the application layer by as much as 35 percent. This increased bandwidth is especially important in communication-intensive application settings, such as agent-based sensor networks, where node failures and link dynamics make providing sufficient inter-agent communication especially challenging.