Push-Sum With Transmission Failures

The push-sum algorithm allows distributed computing of the average on a directed graph, and is particularly relevant when one is restricted to one-way and/or asynchronous communications. We investigate its behavior in the presence of unreliable communication channels where messages can be lost. We show that exponential convergence still holds and deduce fundamental properties that implicitly describe the distribution of the final value obtained. We analyze the error of the final common value we get for the essential case of two nodes, both theoretically and numerically. We provide performance comparison with a standard consensus algorithm.