Multi-Agent Consensus Subject to Communication and Privacy Constraints

Abstract: We consider a multi-agent consensus problem in the presence of adversarial agents. The adversaries are able to listen to the inter-agent communications and try to estimate the state of the agents. The agents have a limited bit-rate for communication and are required to quantize the transmitted signal in order to meet the bit-rate constraint of the communication channel. We propose a consensus protocol that is protected against the adversaries, i.e., the expected mean-square error of the adversary state estimate is lower bounded. In order to deal with the bit-rate constraint, we propose a dynamic quantization scheme that guarantees protected consensus.