Statistical Privacy in Distributed Average Consensus on Bounded Real Inputs

This paper proposes a privacy protocol for distributed average consensus algorithms on bounded real-valued inputs that guarantees statistical privacy of honest agents' inputs against colluding (passive adversarial) agents, if the set of colluding agents is not a vertex cut in the underlying communication network. This implies that privacy of agents' inputs is preserved against t number of arbitrary colluding agents if the connectivity of the communication network is at least (t + 1). A similar privacy protocol has been proposed for the case of bounded integral inputs in our previous paper [1]. However, many applications of distributed consensus concerning distributed control or state estimation deal with real-valued inputs. Thus, in this paper we propose an extension of the privacy protocol in [1], for bounded real-valued agents' inputs, where bounds are known apriori to all the agents.