Network discovery: An estimation based approach

We consider the unaddressed problem of network discovery, in which, an agent attempts to formulate an estimate of the global network topology using only locally available information. We show that under two key assumptions, the network discovery problem can be cast as a parameter estimation problem. Furthermore, we show that some form of excitation must be present in the network to be able to converge to a solution. The performance of two methods for solving the network discovery problem is evaluated in simulation.