Dynamic Leadership Protocol for S-nets
Gregory J. Barlow, Thomas C. Henderson, Andrew L. Nelson, and Edward Grant

Smart Sensor Networks (S-nets) are groups of stationary agents
(S-elements) which provide distributed sensing, computation, and
communication in an environment. In order to integrate information from
individual agents and to efficiently transmit this information to other
agents, these devices must be able to create local groups (S-clusters). A
leadership protocol that creates static clusters has been previously
proposed. Here, we further develop this protocol to allow for dynamic
cluster updating. This accommodates on-the-fly network re-organization in
response to environmental disturbances or the gain or loss of S-elements.
We outline an informal argument for the correctness of this revised
protocol. We describe our embedded system implementation of the leadership
protocol in simulation and using a colony of robots. Finally, we present
results demonstrating both implementations.