Efficient Connectivity Topologies for Networked Control Systems

J. S. Baras

Proceedings of the SIAM Conference on Control & Its Applications (CT09), Denver, Colorado, July 6-8, 2009

Abstract

We develop a unifying analytical framework for networked systems, capturing the essential tradeoff between agent collaboration benefits and costs. We show the critical role of agent connectivity topologies in this tradeoff. We demonstrate that connectivities related to small world and expander graphs offer dramatic advantages for networked systems problems that need a distributed solution. These topologies are efficient from the perspective of costs yet lead to fast convergence of distributed algorithms from the benefits perspective.

Acknowledgment: Research supported by the Communications and Networks Consortium sponsored by the U. S. Army Research Laboratory under the Collaborative Technology Alliance Program, Cooperative Agreement DAAD19-01-2-0011, and by the ARO MAASCOM MURI, grant W911NF-08-1-0238.