Exploiting the Superposition Property of Wireless Communication for Max-Consensus Problems in Multi-Agent Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel wireless consensus protocol that leverages interference to efficiently achieve max-consensus in multi-agent systems, outperforming traditional methods in convergence speed.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new max-consensus protocol exploiting wireless superposition, enabling faster convergence by utilizing interference instead of avoiding it.

Findings

Achieves max-consensus in finite steps

Faster convergence compared to traditional methods

Utilizes interference as a resource rather than an obstacle

Abstract

This paper presents a consensus protocol that achieves max-consensus in multi-agent systems over wireless channels. Interference, a feature of the wireless channel, is exploited: each agent receives a superposition of broadcast data, rather than individual values. With this information, the system endowed with the proposed consensus protocol reaches max-consensus in a finite number of steps. A comparison with traditional approaches shows that the proposed consensus protocol achieves a faster convergence.