On the consensus protocol of conspecific agents

We present a class of consensus protocols over groups of agents with stochastically switching, directed, and weighted communication topologies. In this protocol, an agent’s traits, that is, the cardinality of its neighbor set and the weight assigned to its neighbors in the updating process, are given by two jointly distributed random variables and the neighbors of an agent are selected with equal probability. We provide closed form results for the asymptotic convergence rate and for the steady state mean square deviation in the presence of additive noise. These results are specialized to consensus protocols based on Erdős–Rényi and numerosity-constrained networks.