Synchronized Collective Behavior via Low-cost Communication

TL;DR

This paper investigates how reducing communication costs affects synchronization in self-driven particle groups, revealing optimal and counterintuitive effects across different noise and density conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a phase diagram showing how varying communication costs influence synchronization, including novel abnormal regions where less communication can enhance coherence.

Findings

Optimal message distribution minimizes redundancy

Moderate communication reduction can improve synchronization in certain regimes

Identifies three distinct phases: normal, abnormal, and disordered

Abstract

An important natural phenomenon surfaces that satisfactory synchronization of self-driven particles can be achieved via sharply reduced communication cost, especially for high density particle groups with low external noise. Statistical numerical evidence illustrates that a highly efficient manner is to distribute the communication messages as evenly as possible along the whole dynamic process, since it minimizes the communication redundancy. More surprisingly, it is discovered that there exist some abnormal regions where moderately decreasing the communication cost can even improve the synchronization performance. A phase diagram on the noise-density parameter space is given, where the dynamical behaviors can be divided into three qualitatively different phases: normal phase where better synchronization corresponds to higher communication cost, abnormal phase where moderately decreasing communication cost could even improve the synchronization, and the disordered phase where no coherence among individuals is observed.