Link scheduling in sensor networks for asymmetric average consensus

Wireless Sensor Networks constitute a recent technology where the nodes cooperate to obtain, in a totally distributed way, certain function of the sensed data. One example is the average consensus algorithm, which allows every node to converge to the global average. However, this algorithm presents two major drawbacks in practice. The first one is that instantaneous symmetric links are required, which are hard to ensure in practice because of the presence of wireless interferences. The second one is that all the nodes are required to communicate with all of their local neighbors in every iteration, which can lead to an unbounded delay. In order to solve these issues, we propose a novel link scheduling protocol that activates certain suitable links in each iteration, leading to a new scheme of communications where the links are asymmetric and the communications are performed in a asynchronous manner. This new scheme only requires connectivity and symmetric links on average to guarantee convergence, which are ensured by our link scheduling protocol.