The RoboCup Middle-Size League robotic soccer competitions pose a real cooperation problem for teams of mobile autonomous robots. In the current state-of-practice cooperation is essential to overcome the opponent team and thus a wireless communication protocol and associated middleware are now fundamental components in the multi-robots system architecture. Nevertheless, the wireless communication has relatively low reliability and limited bandwidth. Since it is shared by both teams, it is a fundamental resource that must be used parsimoniously. Curiously, to the best of our knowledge, no previous study on the effective use of the wireless medium in actual game situations was done. In this paper we show how current teams use the wireless medium and we propose a set of best practices towards a more efficient utilization. Then, we present a communication protocol and middleware that follow such best practices and have been successfully used by one particular MSL team in the past four years.
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