In a sensor network, in practice, the communication among sensors is subject to:(1) errors or failures at random times; (3) costs; and(2) constraints since sensors and networks operate under scarce resources, such as power, data rate, or communication. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is usually a main factor in determining the probability of error (or of communication failure) in a link. These probabilities are then a proxy for the SNR under which the links operate. The paper studies the problem of designing the topology, i.e., assigning the probabilities of reliable communication among sensors (or of link failures) to maximize the rate of convergence of average consensus, when the link communication costs are taken into account, and there is an overall communication budget constraint. To consider this problem, we address a number of preliminary issues: (1) model the network as a random topology; (2) establish necessary and sufficient conditions for mean square sense (mss) and almost sure (a.s.) convergence of average consensus when network links fail; and, in particular, (3) show that a necessary and sufficient condition for both mss and a.s. convergence is for the algebraic connectivity of the mean graph describing the network topology to be strictly positive. With these results, we formulate topology design, subject to random link failures and to a communication cost constraint, as a constrained convex optimization problem to which we apply semidefinite programming techniques. We show by an extensive numerical study that the optimal design improves significantly the convergence speed of the consensus algorithm and can achieve the asymptotic performance of a non-random network at a fraction of the communication cost.
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