9Analyzing, Modeling and Predicting Organizational Effects in a Distribuited Sensor Network*

The organizational design of a distributed system defines how entities act and interact to achieve local and global objectives. We describe how a system employing dif-ferent types of organizational techniques has been used to address the challenges posed by a distributed sensor net-work environment. The high-level, multi-agent architec-ture of this realworld system is given in detail, and we pro-vide empirical results demonstrating the effects the organi-zation has on the system’s performance across several dif-ferent metrics. As with any design, the particular approach that is employed makes trade-offs, some of which are obvi-ous and some more subtle. The presence of such trade-offs motivates the need for a better understanding of precisely how the organization influences large and small-scale be-haviors. To address this need, we first demonstrate how a collection of analytic models can be developed to predict such effects. This experience is then used to ground the presentation of a more comprehensive, domain-indepen-dent organizational modeling language called ODML. The structure and capabilities of ODML are explained through the construction of a unified model of our sensor network organization. We then show that this model provides an accurate prediction of the original empirical results