Distributed Average Consensus in Wireless Multi-Agent Systems with Over-the-Air Aggregation

Abstract: In this paper, we address the average consensus problem of multi-agent systems over wireless networks. We propose a distributed average consensus algorithm by invoking the concept of over-the-air aggregation, which exploits the signal superposition property of wireless multiple-access channels. The proposed algorithm deploys a modified version of the well-known Ratio Consensus algorithm with an additional normalization step for compensating for the arbitrary channel coefficients. We show that, when the noise level at the receivers is negligible, the algorithm converges asymptotically to the average for time-invariant and time-varying channels. Numerical simulations corroborate the validity of our results.