Simulating the effect of degraded wireless communications on emergent behavior

Most swarming algorithms require individual nodes to know the locations of their nearest-neighbor peers. Existing work assumes that this information is abundant and readily available, however, when wireless communications are used for data exchange, issues regarding dissemination arise. These include partial or complete data loss and an increased latency, significantly affecting the quality of the delivered service. In this paper, we show through extensive experimental analysis that swarm intelligent algorithms are vulnerable to degraded communication. To show how communication is affected in a contested environment, we introduce a local interaction statistic metric to capture emergence. Our analysis using agent-based simulation characterizes the decay of inherent emergence and swarm efficiency with increasing data loss and delay.