Performance metrics in the average consensus problem: A tutorial

The average consensus algorithm is a distributed procedure which allows a network of agents to agree on the average of a set of initial values. The computation occurs through local exchange of information only, namely the information exchange takes place only between agents which are neighbors with respect to a graph representing the system communication architecture. Several performance metrics have been proposed for the evaluation of this algorithm. Particularly interesting and challenging is to relate them to the communication topology. Different performance metrics may yield different answers in comparing alternative communication topologies. In this paper, we present a few performance metrics and we show how these metrics are related to the communication topology. In particular, when available, we present bounds which permit to relate performance and topology for general graphs, for graphs with symmetries, called d-dimensional tori, and for geometric graphs.