Average consensus in wireless sensor networks: Will it blend?

Average consensus (AC) is a popular method for distributed innetwork averaging that is closely related to diffusion processes. Recently, it has been suggested that AC designs inspired by physical advection processes feature improved performance. In this paper, we show how such advection-diffusion inspired AC designs can be obtained for realistic network topologies. The resulting AC algorithms act like a blender that mixes the measured data. Numerical simulations corroborate the performance improvements of our blending approach to the design of AC algorithms.