SCALING-UP DISTRIBUTED SENSOR NETWORKS: COOPERATIVE LARGE-SCALE MOBILE-AGENT ORGANIZATIONS

We present a system called the Distributed Dispatcher Manager (DDM) for effectively managing very large-scale networks of thousands of sensor agents and thousands of objects. DDM makes use of a hierarchical team organization in which the solution process is distributed into smaller fragments of problems that can be solved partially by simple agents. We present extensive experimental results which indicate that problems involving hundreds and thousands of Dopplers and targets cannot be solved in a traditional flat architecture. We also present a new sensor tracking algorithm through which a single agent can track an object by taking multiple sequential measurements and combining them. We then suggest ways to combine partial solutions to form a global solution. We show that the number of levels in the hierarchy influences the accuracy of results. As the number of levels increases the number of tracked targets drops, even though this drop is moderate. However, as the number of levels increases the time every agent needs to complete its mission drops exponentially. By combinin