A case study of organizational effects in a distributed sensor network

We describe how a system employing different types of organizational techniques addresses the challenges posed by a large-scale distributed sensor network environment. The high-level multiagent architecture of real-world system is given in detail, and empirical and analytic results are provided showing the various effects that organizational characteristics have on the system´s performance. We show how partitioning of the environment can lead to better locality and more constrained communication, as well as disproportionate load on individuals or increased load on the population as a whole. The presence of such tradeoffs motivates the need for a better understanding of organizational effects.