Supporting context-aware interaction in dynamic multi-agent systems

The increasing ubiquity of mobile computing devices has made mobile ad hoc networks an everyday occurrence. Applications in these networks are commonly structured as a logical network of mobile agents that coordinate with each other to achieve their goals. In these highly dynamic multi-agent systems, the multitude of devices provides a varied and rapidly changing context in which agents must learn to operate. Successful end-user applications will not only learn to handle dynamic conditions, but will take advantage of the wide variety of available information and resources. Any environment that supports agents and their interactions must facilitate flexible communication mechanisms. Such protocols for enabling an application agents task of gathering contextual information must function in a timely and adaptive fashion. This paper presents a protocol for mediating these context-based interactions among mobile agents. We present an implementation and show how it facilitates information exchange among mobile application agents. We also provide an analysis of the tradeoffs between consistency and range of context definitions in highly dynamic ad hoc networks.