Experimental evaluation of the RT-WMP for typical multi-robot systems in real-life indoor environment

Abstract

The RT-WMP is a token-passing protocol based protocol that applied to the mobile ad-hoc network. It has many advantages. For instance, it supports real-time traffic, multi-hop capabilities. Especially, the messages could be scheduled in the multi-robots communications so that the one with higher priority will be transmitted earlier. This paper analyzes the state-of-the-art of ad-hoc network protocols and evaluates the RT-WMP routing protocol for multi-robot systems in a typical indoor environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the RT-WMP protocol guarantees the priority of message transmission in real-time task implemented by the multi-robot system. In addition, the RT-WMP works steadily when we change the priority manually. This work is a benchmark for adding allocation strategies in the RT-WMP.