Hermes: a Wireless Communication Interface for Edge Computing

Using wireless communication technologies and protocols in embedded systems is not a trivial undertaking, since it frequently requires an exhaustive understanding of protocols and APIs. The goal of this work is to address the issue by providing a unified interface (API) for developers to utilise various communication protocols in a black-box manner. This interface is provided by Hermes, the library we developed. Hermes uses the object-oriented programming paradigm and it is written entirely in C++ using the Arduino libraries. The library supports ESP-NOW for short-range wireless communications, as well as WiFi Mesh and LoRa Mesh for mesh network construction, with the first one supporting point-to-point communications over small distances and the second one supporting long-range communications. Although this library is useful in any context, it has been specifically designed to enable distributed communication between the agents of Democle, a declarative multi-agent platform for agent-based edge computing, which we will briefly describe. This paper presents an overview of Hermes, including its architecture, capabilities, and utility inside the Democle platform.