Quantized consensus over directed networks with switching topologies

This paper studies the quantized consensus problem for a group of agents over directed networks with switching topologies. We propose an effective distributed protocol with an adaptive finite-level uniform quantized strategy, under which consensus among agents is guaranteed with weaker communication conditions. In particular, we analytically prove that each agent sending 5-level quantized information to each of its neighbors, together with 3-level quantized information to itself at each time step, which suffices for attaining consensus with an exponential convergence rate as long as the duration of all link failures in the directed network is bounded. By dropping the typical common left eigenvector requirement for the existence of common quadratic Lyapunov function, we conduct the convergence analysis based on the notion of input-to-output stability. The proposed quantized protocol has favorable merits of requiring little communication overhead and increasing robustness to link unreliability, and it fits well into the digital network framework. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.