Coordination through multicast messaging in a multiple-mobile agent system (MMAS)

The purpose of this paper is to describe coordination among agent-groups via multicast messaging in a multiple-mobile agent system (MMAS). Maintaining coordination and communication between agent groups, whilst relatively simple in the non-distributed paradigm, can impose a significant overhead on the developers of distributed/mobile agent systems. An architecture to simplify this task, based on IP multicast-based messaging, has been designed and implemented. It has been evaluated by employing it in the development of middleware to support a real-time sensor environment intended for use in contest-aware computing.