Communication Collective: An Adaptive Multiagent Communication Platform
Alexis Pflaum, Claudia Szabo, Andrew J. Coyle · 2019
A robust, consistent and high-capacity data network is critical in modern society to ensure that governments, businesses and individuals are able to communicate and coordinate disaster relief, just in time deliveries, or to organize how and where to meet friends. Existing terrestrial communication networks are susceptible to being disabled or destroyed by disasters and the use of satellites is costly and inflexible. We propose a communication protocol, called Communication Collective, to operate in a resource constrained, dynamic and contested environment with distributed, learning, adaptive, predictive, mobile agents. Each agent operative gathers information from the environment and the surrounding Communication Collective and independently weighs its options on how to behave to improve the performance of the collective. Our experimental analysis shows the potential of our approach, with improved delivered messages and significantly reduced latency.