Distributed Average Consensus Algorithms in d-Regular Bipartite Graphs: Comparative Study

Abstract

Consensus-based data aggregation in d-regular bipartite graphs poses a challenging task for the scientific community since some of these algorithms diverge in this critical graph topology. Nevertheless, one can see a lack of scientific studies dealing with this topic in the literature. Motivated by our recent research concerned with this issue, we provide a comparative study of frequently applied consensus algorithms for distributed averaging in d-regular bipartite graphs in this paper. More specifically, we examine the performance of these algorithms with bounded execution in this topology in order to identify which algorithm can achieve the consensus despite no reconfiguration and find the best-performing algorithm in these graphs. In the experimental part, we apply the number of iterations required for consensus to evaluate the performance of the algorithms in randomly generated regular bipartite graphs with various connectivities and for three configurations of the applied stopping criterion, allowing us to identify the optimal distributed consensus algorithm for this graph topology. Moreover, the obtained experimental results presented in this paper are compared to other scientific manuscripts where the analyzed algorithms are examined in non-regular non-bipartite topologies.