Estimation Network Design framework for efficient distributed optimization
This work addresses communication bottlenecks in distributed systems for applications like network control and data ranking, offering a flexible approach to improve efficiency without case-by-case analysis.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient communication in distributed optimization by introducing the Estimation Network Design (END) framework, which exploits sparsity in decision vectors to reduce communication overhead and memory costs, as demonstrated through simulations in sensor networks.
Distributed decision problems features a group of agents that can only communicate over a peer-to-peer network, without a central memory. In applications such as network control and data ranking, each agent is only affected by a small portion of the decision vector: this sparsity is typically ignored in distributed algorithms, while it could be leveraged to improve efficiency and scalability. To address this issue, our recent paper introduces Estimation Network Design (END), a graph theoretical language for the analysis and design of distributed iterations. END algorithms can be tuned to exploit the sparsity of specific problem instances, reducing communication overhead and minimizing redundancy, yet without requiring case-by-case convergence analysis. In this paper, we showcase the flexility of END in the context of distributed optimization. In particular, we study the sparsity-aware version of many established methods, including ADMM, AugDGM and Push-Sum DGD. Simulations on an estimation problem in sensor networks demonstrate that END algorithms can boost convergence speed and greatly reduce the communication and memory cost.