On the robustness of event-based synchronization under switching interactions

In this paper we study the robustness of an event-triggered synchronization dynamics for a network of identical nodes under various switching scenarios. We first consider an arbitrary switching scenario where, for a general class of isolated node dynamics we characterize sufficient conditions in terms of network topologies to maintain synchronization. In particular, we shall also demonstrate that for a specific class of skew-symmetric isolated node dynamics—which play important role in this class of synchronization problems—the asymptotic synchronization is not achievable under arbitrary switching. We then consider two classes of constrained switching signals, namely uniform and average classes, i.e., S
dwell
[τ
D
], and S
average
[τ
a
,N
0
], respectively, where we characterize sufficient conditions in terms of the associated parameters, τ
D
, τ
a
and N
0
in order to ensure asymptotic synchronization. We shall wrap up our discussion by presenting relevant simulation studies.