A Diffusion Protocol for Detection of Link Failure and Utilization of Resources in Multi-Agent Systems

Several applications in a large scale network depend on diffusion of information from one node to others. In this paper, we propose a diffusion protocol for networked multi-agent systems based on both the structure of the network and the priority of agents. The agents (nodes in the network) interact with their neighbors for the diffusion of information based on the weighted difference of the resources available at the neighboring nodes. We observe that the system finally reaches to a weighted agreement which is proportional to the priority of the nodes, or the degree of the nodes. We also perform a convergence analysis of the proposed protocol on both static networks as well as dynamic networks. We propose three different applications where such diffusion protocols can be used – (i) in the detection of link failure, (ii) for ensuring security and utilization of network resources, and (iii) to come up with a static fixed point convergence over a dynamic network. The impact of stability and convergence of the proposed diffusion protocol have also been analyzed through simulation results under different test scenarios. The observations from the simulation validate the theoretical findings of the diffusion protocol and its applicability under different applications.