Communication Link Elimination in Static LQG Teams

Abstract

We consider here a scenario in which a team of agents switch to a secure shared communication channel with limited bandwidth to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. To deal with the limited bandwidth, the agents identify which communication links in the team can be eliminated without paying a high penalty in terms of the performance of the control task. We formulate this problem as an LQG team problem with communication link elimination. Using Schur Complement Eigenvalue Interlacing Property, we bound the achievable optimal cost for removing only one communication link within the team problem. Under certain assumptions on the eigenvalues of the cost and covariance matrices, we identify an (heuristic) index-based link elimination policy with some tight performance guarantees. We substantiate our bounds with numerical simulation on random instances of static team problems and identify interesting directions for future research.