Event-triggered Approximate Byzantine Consensus with Multi-hop Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces an event-triggered algorithm for resilient consensus in multi-agent networks with Byzantine faults, utilizing multi-hop communication to improve robustness and reduce communication overhead, with proven effectiveness through simulations.

Contribution

It presents a novel event-triggered consensus algorithm that leverages multi-hop communication and provides graph conditions for delay robustness in Byzantine environments.

Findings

The algorithm achieves resilient consensus despite Byzantine faults.

Multi-hop communication reduces network connectivity requirements.

Numerical results demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a resilient consensus problem for the multi-agent network where some of the agents are subject to Byzantine attacks and may transmit erroneous state values to their neighbors. In particular, we develop an event-triggered update rule to tackle this problem as well as reduce the communication for each agent. Our approach is based on the mean subsequence reduced (MSR) algorithm with agents being capable to communicate with multi-hop neighbors. Since delays are critical in such an environment, we provide necessary graph conditions for the proposed algorithm to perform well with delays in the communication. We highlight that through multi-hop communication, the network connectivity can be reduced especially in comparison with the common onehop communication case. Lastly, we show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by a numerical example.