Compressive Diffusion Strategies Over Distributed Networks for Reduced Communication Load

We study the compressive diffusion strategies over distributed networks based on the diffusion implementation and adaptive extraction of the information from the compressed diffusion data. We demonstrate that one can achieve a comparable performance to the full information exchange configurations, even if the diffused information is compressed into a scalar or a single bit, i.e., a tremendous reduction in the communication load. To this end, we provide a complete performance analysis for the compressive diffusion strategies. We analyze the transient, the steady-state and the tracking performances of the configurations in which the diffused data is compressed into a scalar or a single-bit. We propose a new adaptive combination method improving the convergence performance of the compressive diffusion strategies further. In the new method, we introduce one more freedom-of-dimension in the combination matrix and adapt it by using the conventional mixture approach in order to enhance the convergence performance for any possible combination rule used for the full diffusion configuration. We demonstrate that our theoretical analysis closely follow the ensemble averaged results in our simulations. We provide numerical examples showing the improved convergence performance with the new adaptive combination method while tremendously reducing the communication load.