An event-triggered distributed primal-dual algorithm for Network Utility maximization

Abstract— Many problems associated with networked systems can be formulated as network utility maximization (NUM) problems. NUM problems maximize a global separable measure of network optimality subject to linear constraints on resources. Dual decomposition is a widely used distributed algorithm that solves the NUM problem. This approach, however, uses a step size that is inversely proportional to measures of network size such as maximum path length or maximum neighborhood size. As a result, the number of messages exchanged between nodes by a dual decomposition scales poorly with respect to these measures. This paper presents a distributed primal-dual algorithm for the NUM problem that uses event-triggering. Under event triggering, each agent broadcasts to its neighbors when a local “error” signal exceeds a state dependent threshold. The paper establishes such state-dependent event-triggering thresholds under which the proposed algorithm converges. The paper gives an upper bound ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CDC
• Authors: Pu Wan, Michael D. Lemmon
• Keywords: Algorithm, CDC 2009, Control Systems, Dual Decomposition, NUM Problem