Distributed network topology reconstruction in presence of anonymous nodes

This paper concerns the problem of reconstructing the network topology from data propagated through the network by means of an average consensus protocol. The proposed method is based on the distributed estimation of graph Lapla-cian spectral properties. Precisely, the identification of the network topology is implemented by estimating both eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the consensus matrix, which is related to the graph Laplacian matrix. In this paper, we focus the exposition on the estimation of the eigenvectors since the eigenvalues estimation can be achieved based on recent results of the literature using the same kind of data. We show how the topology can be reconstructed in presence of anonymous nodes, i.e. nodes that do not disclose their ID.