No Arabic abstract
We consider the distributed weight balancing problem in networks of nodes that are interconnected via directed edges, each of which is able to admit a positive integer weight within a certain interval, captured by individual lower and upper limits. A digraph with positive integer weights on its (directed) edges is weight-balanced if, for each node, the sum of the weights of the incoming edges equals the sum of the weights of the outgoing edges. In this work, we develop a distributed iterative algorithm which solves the integer weight balancing problem in the presence of arbitrary (time-varying and inhomogeneous) time delays that might affect transmissions at particular links. We assume that communication between neighboring nodes is bidirectional, but unreliable since it may be affected from bounded or unbounded delays (packet drops), independently between different links and link directions. We show that, even when communication links are affected from bounded delays or occasional packet drops (but not permanent communication link failures), the proposed distributed algorithm allows the nodes to converge to a set of weight values that solves the integer weight balancing problem, after a finite number of iterations with probability one, as long as the necessary and sufficient circulation conditions on the lower and upper edge weight limits are satisfied. Finally, we provide examples to illustrate the operation and performance of the proposed algorithms.
Classical distributed estimation scenarios typically assume timely and reliable exchanges of information over the sensor network. This paper, in contrast, considers single time-scale distributed estimation via a sensor network subject to transmission time-delays. The proposed discrete-time networked estimator consists of two steps: (i) consensus on (delayed) a-priori estimates, and (ii) measurement update. The sensors only share their a-priori estimates with their out-neighbors over (possibly) time-delayed transmission links. The delays are assumed to be fixed over time, heterogeneous, and known. We assume distributed observability instead of local observability, which significantly reduces the communication/sensing loads on sensors. Using the notions of augmented matrices and Kronecker product, the convergence of the proposed estimator over strongly-connected networks is proved for a specific upper-bound on the time-delay.
This paper studies distributed optimal formation control with hard constraints on energy levels and termination time, in which the formation error is to be minimized jointly with the energy cost. The main contributions include a globally optimal distributed formation control law and a comprehensive analysis of the resulting closed-loop system under those hard constraints. It is revealed that the energy levels, the task termination time, the steady-state error tolerance, as well as the network topology impose inherent limitations in achieving the formation control mission. Most notably, the lower bounds on the achievable termination time and the required minimum energy levels are derived, which are given in terms of the initial formation error, the steady-state error tolerance, and the largest eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix. These lower bounds can be employed to assert whether an energy and time constrained formation task is achievable and how to accomplish such a task. Furthermore, the monotonicity of those lower bounds in relation to the control parameters is revealed. A simulation example is finally given to illustrate the obtained results.
This paper studies the distributed average tracking problem pertaining to a discrete-time linear time-invariant multi-agent network, which is subject to, concurrently, input delays, random packet-drops, and reference noise. The problem amounts to an integrated design of delay and packet-drop tolerant algorithm and determining the ultimate upper bound of the tracking error between agents states and the average of the reference signals. The investigation is driven by the goal of devising a practically more attainable average tracking algorithm, thereby extending the existing work in the literature which largely ignored the aforementioned uncertainties. For this purpose, a blend of techniques from Kalman filtering, multi-stage consensus filtering, and predictive control is employed, which gives rise to a simple yet comepelling distributed average tracking algorithm that is robust to initialization error and allows the trade-off between communication/computation cost and stationary-state tracking error. Due to the inherent coupling among different control components, convergence analysis is significantly challenging. Nevertheless, it is revealed that the allowable values of the algorithm parameters rely upon the maximal degree of an expected network, while the convergence speed depends upon the second smallest eigenvalue of the same networks topology. The effectiveness of the theoretical results is verified by a numerical example.
Stream applications are widely deployed on the cloud. While modern distributed streaming systems like Flink and Spark Streaming can schedule and execute them efficiently, streaming dataflows are often dynamically changing, which may cause computation imbalance and backpressure. We introduce AutoFlow, an automatic, hotspot-aware dynamic load balance system for streaming dataflows. It incorporates a centralized scheduler which monitors the load balance in the entire dataflow dynamically and implements state migrations correspondingly. The scheduler achieves these two tasks using a simple asynchronous distributed control message mechanism and a hotspot-diminishing algorithm. The timing mechanism supports implicit barriers and a highly efficient state-migration without global barriers or pauses to operators. It also supports a time-window based load-balance measurement and feeds them to the hotspot-diminishing algorithm without user interference. We implemented AutoFlow on top of Ray, an actor-based distributed execution framework. Our evaluation based on various streaming benchmark dataset shows that AutoFlow achieves good load-balance and incurs a low latency overhead in highly data-skew workload.
We study systems of identical coupled oscillators introducing a distribution of delay times in the coupling. For arbitrary network topologies, we show that the frequency and stability of the fully synchronized states depend only on the mean of the delay distribution. However, synchronization dynamics is sensitive to the shape of the distribution. In the presence of coupling delays, the synchronization rate can be maximal for a specific value of the coupling strength.