First Experiences with the Implementation and Evaluation of Population Protocols on Physical Devices

In this paper we present an implementation of Population Protocols, a well-known fully decentralized computational model, on physical devices. We implemented the protocols sensing platforms developed with the support of the SocioPatterns research collaboration. This implementation enabled us to evaluate the protocols on a small-scale social network and thus to demonstrate their feasibility to run on real hardware platforms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time Population Protocols are implemented and tested on real physical devices. We also collected traces of social interactions to setup simulations on NetLogo, and thus enable the comparison of results obtained through simulation with those obtained in real experiments.