Distributed two-time-scale methods over clustered networks

In this paper, we consider consensus problems over a network of nodes, where the network is divided into a number of clusters. We are interested in the case where the communication topology within each cluster is dense as compared to the sparse communication across the clusters. Moreover, each cluster has one leader which can communicate with other leaders in different clusters. The goal of the nodes is to agree at some common value under the presence of communication delays across the clusters. Our main contribution is to propose a novel distributed two-time-scale consensus algorithm, which pertains to the separation in network topology of clustered networks. In particular, one scale is to model the dynamic of the agents in each cluster, which is much faster (due to the dense communication) than the scale describing the slowly aggregated evolution between the clusters (due to the sparse communication). We prove the convergence of the proposed method in the presence of uniform, but possibly arbitrarily large, communication delays between the leaders. In addition, we provided an explicit formula for the convergence rate of such algorithm, which characterizes the impact of delays and the network topology. Our results shows that after a transient time characterized by the topology of each cluster, the convergence of the two-time-scale consensus method only depends on the connectivity of the leaders. Finally, we validate our theoretical results by a number of numerical simulations on different clustered networks

Distributed Decision Through Self-Synchronizing Sensor Networks in the Presence of Propagation Delays and Asymmetric Channels

In this paper we propose and analyze a distributed algorithm for achieving globally optimal decisions, either estimation or detection, through a self-synchronization mechanism among linearly coupled integrators initialized with local measurements. We model the interaction among the nodes as a directed graph with weights (possibly) dependent on the radio channels and we pose special attention to the effect of the propagation delay occurring in the exchange of data among sensors, as a function of the network geometry. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the proposed system to reach a consensus on globally optimal decision statistics. One of the major results proved in this work is that a consensus is reached with exponential convergence speed for any bounded delay condition if and only if the directed graph is quasi-strongly connected. We provide a closed form expression for the global consensus, showing that the effect of delays is, in general, the introduction of a bias in the final decision. Finally, we exploit our closed form expression to devise a double-step consensus mechanism able to provide an unbiased estimate with minimum extra complexity, without the need to know or estimate the channel parameters.Comment: To be published on IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

On the convergence rate of distributed gradient methods for finite-sum optimization under communication delays

Motivated by applications in machine learning and statistics, we study distributed optimization problems over a network of processors, where the goal is to optimize a global objective composed of a sum of local functions. In these problems, due to the large scale of the data sets, the data and computation must be distributed over processors resulting in the need for distributed algorithms. In this paper, we consider a popular distributed gradient-based consensus algorithm, which only requires local computation and communication. An important problem in this area is to analyze the convergence rate of such algorithms in the presence of communication delays that are inevitable in distributed systems. We prove the convergence of the gradient-based consensus algorithm in the presence of uniform, but possibly arbitrarily large, communication delays between the processors. Moreover, we obtain an upper bound on the rate of convergence of the algorithm as a function of the network size, topology, and the inter-processor communication delays

On Robustness Analysis of a Dynamic Average Consensus Algorithm to Communication Delay

This paper studies the robustness of a dynamic average consensus algorithm to communication delay over strongly connected and weight-balanced (SCWB) digraphs. Under delay-free communication, the algorithm of interest achieves a practical asymptotic tracking of the dynamic average of the time-varying agents' reference signals. For this algorithm, in both its continuous-time and discrete-time implementations, we characterize the admissible communication delay range and study the effect of the delay on the rate of convergence and the tracking error bound. Our study also includes establishing a relationship between the admissible delay bound and the maximum degree of the SCWB digraphs. We also show that for delays in the admissible bound, for static signals the algorithms achieve perfect tracking. Moreover, when the interaction topology is a connected undirected graph, we show that the discrete-time implementation is guaranteed to tolerate at least one step delay. Simulations demonstrate our results

Decentralized Event-Triggered Consensus of Linear Multi-agent Systems under Directed Graphs

An event-triggered control technique for consensus of multi-agent systems with general linear dynamics is presented. This paper extends previous work to consider agents that are connected using directed graphs. Additionally, the approach shown here provides asymptotic consensus with guaranteed positive inter-event time intervals. This event-triggered control method is also used in the case where communication delays are present. For the communication delay case we also show that the agents achieve consensus asymptotically and that, for every agent, the time intervals between consecutive transmissions is lower-bounded by a positive constant.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, A preliminary version of this manuscript has been submitted to the 2015 American Control Conferenc

Asymptotic Consensus Without Self-Confidence

This paper studies asymptotic consensus in systems in which agents do not necessarily have self-confidence, i.e., may disregard their own value during execution of the update rule. We show that the prevalent hypothesis of self-confidence in many convergence results can be replaced by the existence of aperiodic cores. These are stable aperiodic subgraphs, which allow to virtually store information about an agent's value distributedly in the network. Our results are applicable to systems with message delays and memory loss.Comment: 13 page