On the robustness of event-based synchronization under switching interactions

In this paper we study the robustness of an event-triggered synchronization dynamics for a network of identical nodes under various switching scenarios. We first consider an arbitrary switching scenario where, for a general class of isolated node dynamics we characterize sufficient conditions in terms of network topologies to maintain synchronization. In particular, we shall also demonstrate that for a specific class of skew-symmetric isolated node dynamics-which play important role in this class of synchronization problems-the asymptotic synchronization is not achievable under arbitrary switching. We then consider two classes of constrained switching signals, namely uniform and average classes, i.e., S_dwell[τ_D], and S_average[τ_a,N₀], respectively, where we characterize sufficient conditions in terms of the associated parameters, τ_D, τ_a and N₀ in order to ensure asymptotic synchronization. We shall wrap up our discussion by presenting relevant simulation studies.