Distributed average consensus in multi-agent networks with limited bandwidth and time-delays

This paper studies the distributed average consensus problem of multi-agent digital networks with time-delays. For the network, each agent can only exchange symbolic data with its neighbours. We provide a distributed average consensus protocol which uses the quantized and time-delay information. We consider two types of dynamic encoders/decoders in our protocol. One uses inverse proportion function as scaling function, while the other uses exponential function as scaling function. All agents can reach average consensus asymptotically with our protocol. Furthermore, we show that the average consensus protocol is robust to finite symmetric time-delays, but is sensitive to asymmetric time-delays that will destroy the average consensus of the networks. Finally, simulations are presented to illustrate validity of our theoretical results.