Decentralized Brains: A Reference Implementation with Performance Evaluation

Decentralized Brains is a concept developed for multiple parallel control of decentralized collaborative swarms and systems. This systems communication paradigm comprises of local peer-to-peer control as well as the global state management which is required for large-scale collaborative systems. The scenarios vary from self-assembly protocols for aerospace structures to organizing a warehouse in a material-handling context where heterogeneous systems collaboratively accomplish a task. A reference implementation of the conceptualized protocol is developed and deployed in a 345 node test bed. A reliable broadcast communication primitive using synchronous broadcast is deployed in a dual-band System on Chip (SoC) micro-controller. The performance of the adopted synchronous broadcast for network-wide flooding and consensus is presented in this article. The firmware is based on the latest branch of Contiki-Open Source Operating System - Next Generation (Contiki-NG) to keep further open source implementations easier and modularized as per the ISO OSI networking model. Using the concepts of multi-hop mesh networking, network flooding using synchronous broadcasts from wireless sensor networks and multi-band radio controllers for cognitive radios, a hardware-software architecture is developed, deployed and evaluated. The synchronous broadcast has a success rate of more than 95% in network wide floods and the implicit network wide time synchronisation of less than 1 ms which is evaluated using experiments using a 345 node test bed is presented in this paper. The developed communication primitives for the target hardware CC1350 STK and the developed experiments are available at https://github.com/akrv/deBr.