Distributed quantized consensus for agents on directed networks

Communication bandwidth and network topology are two important factors that affect performance of distributed consensus in multi-agent systems. The available works about quantized average consensus assume that the adjacency matrices associated with the digraphs are doubly stochastic, which amounts to that the digital networks are balanced. However, this assumption may be unrealistic in practice. In this paper, without assuming double stochasticity, the authors revisit an existing quantized average consensus protocol with the logarithmic quantization scheme, and investigate the quantized consensus problem in general directed digital networks that are strongly connected but not necessarily balanced. The authors first derive an achievable upper bound of the quantization precision parameter to design suitable logarithmic quantizer, and this bound explicitly depends on network topology. Subsequently, by means of the matrix transformation and the Lyapunov techniques, the authors provide a testable condition under which the weighted average consensus can be achieved with the proposed quantized protocol.