Consensus control for multi-agent systems with unknown fading channels and limited bandwidth

This paper is concerned with the consensus of multi-agent systems (MASs) in the presence of fading channels and limited communication bandwidth. These issues will lead to inaccurate and energy constraints of communication data respectively, which will not be possible for MASs to achieve consensus. To this end, this paper proposes a variable structure encoding-decoding scheme (VS-EDS), which includes an encoder with a unitary signal generator and a corresponding decoder with an adaptive activation module. The advantages of the proposed VS-EDS are mainly in three aspects. First, it avoids the need for existing methods to perform a large amount of statistical work on the statistics of fading gains before the system runs. Second, it can eliminate the communication errors caused by fading. At the same time, it can adapt to the changing communication network environment. In addition, in order to achieve consensus control, a distributed protocol based on the VS-EDS is designed. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the VS-EDS are demonstrated through comparative simulations.