Agent-Based Modelling for Distributed Decision Support in an IoT Network

An increasing number of emerging applications, e.g.,Internet of Things (IoT), vehicular communications, augmented reality, and the growing complexity due to the interoperability requirements of these systems, lead to the need to change the tools used for the modeling and analysis of those networks. Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) as a bottom-up modeling approach considers a network of autonomous agents interacting with each other, and therefore represents an ideal framework to comprehend the interactions of heterogeneous nodes in a complex environment. Here, we investigate the suitability of ABM tomodel the communication aspects of a road traffic management system as an example of an IoT network. We model, analyze and compare various Medium Access Control (MAC) layer protocols for two different scenarios, namely uncoordinated and coordinated. Besides, we model the scheduling mechanisms for the coordinated scenario as a high level MAC protocol by using three different approaches: Centralized Decision Maker, DESYNC and decentralized learning MAC (L-MAC). The results clearlyshow the importance of coordination between multiple decision makers in order to improve the information reporting error and spectrum utilization of the system.