Performance of Consensus and Formation Control subject to Bernoulli, Slotted Aloha and IEEE 802.11p Simulation Models

Abstract

We consider distributed control algorithms in multi-agent systems in which all the agents cooperatively work on a given task. Timely exchange of information is essential for good performance of distributed control algorithms. Wireless communication used for information exchange in such systems is lossy and the reliability of wireless communication depends on many factors. We consider systems where one communication channel is shared by all the agents. To establish reliable communication we need efficient media access schemes. In this paper we evaluate with slotted Aloha and IEEE 802.11p the influence of two different media access control algorithms on the performance of the two distributed control algorithms consensus and formation control. We compare these findings to the performance when wireless media access control is modelled using a simple Bernoulli model. We show simulation results how far consensus and formation in multi-agent systems using IEEE 802.11p media access control outperform the ones using slotted Aloha. Moreover, we present results showing that performance simulations using IEEE 802.11p networks is comparable to the results retrieved from multi-agent systems simulated with a simple Bernoulli modelled communication channel.