Distributed topology control of dynamic networks

In this paper, we present a distributed control framework for controlling the topology of dynamic multi-agent networks. Agents are equipped with local sensing and wireless communication capabilities, however, due to power constraints, they are required to switch between two modes of operation, namely active and sleep. The control objective investigated in this paper is to determine distributed coordination protocols that regulate switching between the operation modes of every agent such that the overall network guarantees multi-hop communication links among a subset of so called boundary agents. In the proposed framework, coordination is based on a virtual market where every request to switch off is associated with a bid. Combinations of requests are verified with respect to connectivity and the one corresponding to the highest aggregate bid is finally served. Other than nearest neighbor information, our approach assumes no knowledge of the network topology, while verification of connectivity relies on notions of algebraic graph theory as well as gossip algorithms run over the network. Integration of the individual controllers results in an asynchronous networked control system for which we show that it satisfies the connectivity specification almost surely. We finally illustrate efficiency of our scalable approach in nontrivial computer simulations.