Achieving Distributed Consensus in UWB Sensor Networks: A Low Sampling Rate Scheme with Quantized Measurements

Distributed consensus in sensor networks has received great attention in the last few years. Most of the research activity has been devoted to study the sensor interactions that allow the convergence of distributed consensus algorithms toward a globally optimal decision. On the other hand, the problem of designing an appropriate radio interface enabling such interactions has received little attention in the literature. Motivated by the above consideration, in this work an ultrawideband sensor network is considered and a physical layer scheme is designed, which allows the active sensors to achieve consensus in a distributed manner without the need of any admission protocol. We focus on the class of the so-called quantized distributed consensus algorithms in which the local measurements or current states of each sensor belong to a finite set. Particular attention is devoted to address the practical implementation issues as well as to the development of a receiver architecture with the same performance of existing alternatives based on an all-digital implementation but with a much lower sampling frequency on the order of MHz instead of GHz

A scalable wireless communication architecture for average consensus,” in

Abstract-This paper introduces a multiple-access coding technique that is tailored to solve average consensus problems efficiently in wireless networks. We propose a novel data driven architecture which grants channel access to nodes based on their local data values. We analyze the performance of the scheme in the presence of quantization errors and noise. We show that our scheme is unbiased with respect to quantized consensus algorithms, it achieves good MSE performance, and it can be configured to provide a speedup in the convergence rate. The amount of speedup achieved is a function of |Q k | which indicates the number of quantization bins used to represent the state variables exchanged during the computation