Asynchronous Consensus Protocols: Preliminary Results, Simulations and Open Questions

Consensus is well accepted as being a fundamental paradigm for coordination of groups of autonomous agents. Recently, we casted previous work on multi-agent consensus protocols into an asynchronous framework, where each agent updates on its own pace, and uses the most recently received information from other agents. Asynchronous consensus protocols encompass those synchronous ones with various communication patterns. In this paper, we study via simulation a number of open new problems introduced by the asynchronous operation of multi-agent systems. More interestingly, the existing consensus results are classified by their communication assumptions and future research directions are proposed. To facilitate our study, we develop a multi-vehicle simulator in Java, built on top of JProwler; JProwler is a discrete event simulator for prototyping, verifying and analyzing communication protocols of ad-hoc wireless networks. Implementation issues with their implications are also discussed.