A greedy perturbation approach to accelerating consensus algorithms and reducing its power consumption

The average consensus is part of a family of algorithms that are able to compute global statistics by only using local data. This capability makes these algorithms interesting for applications in which these distributed philosophy is necessary. However, its iterative nature usually leads to a large power consumption due to the repetitive communications among the iterations. This drawback highlights the necessity of minimizing the power consumption until consensus is reached. In this work, we propose a greedy approach to perturbing the connectivity graph, in order to improve the convergence time of the consensus algorithm while keeping bounded the power consumption per iteration step. These two achievements lead to a reduction in the total power consumption required until consensus is reached.