Achieving energy-efficient distributed consensus in wireless scale free networks

The so-called scale free property is a feature of many complex systems, including the Internet and World Wide Web, where most nodes have just a few links whereas the rest have a huge number of them. The traditional models conceived to reproduce the formation of these systems do not take into account the topological features of the growing network. Nevertheless, the resulting topology has a major influence on important properties of the network, such as synchronization and consensus time of nodes, network robustness, etc. In this work, we propose a new growth model that, starting from a random deployment of nodes, performs a wiring process using a metric that balances the degree of the nodes (preferential attachment), the euclidean distance (power consumption) and the algebraic connectivity (consensus time among others). Numerical results show that our proposal not only captures the properties of scale free networks, but also achieves a final topology that leads to more energy-efficient processes than traditional approaches.