Effects of Information Sharing on Swarm Based Communication in Dynamic Environments

The use of swarm intelligence aims to aid information sharing in contested and dynamic environments, where network bandwidth is limited and computational resources are overused. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of a swarm-inspired data ferrying algorithm in the context of a dynamic environment. We simulate a beehive and observe how bees perform as a swarm through exchanging incomplete data items. Our analysis shows improvements of up to 35% when a stigmergic approach is used, showing the benefit of stigmergic information sharing within various communication protcols.