Advanced Topics in Control

Abstract

In this project, inspired by a distributed ledger technology called IOTA, we model and analyze a simplified version of the IOTA consensus algorithm from a distributed control system point of view and test it on different, randomly generated, complete graph topologies. First we propose a randomized distributed averaging algorithm and show that all nodes converge to consensus almost surely. Then, in order to make it robust to malicious nodes, we implement a control strategy on some nodes called coordinators that update their opinions to steer the collective behaviour of the network towards a given reference, thus achieving some kind of robustness against the influence of the malicious nodes themselves. We provide mathematical guarantees on some scenarios and conjectures on others based on simulations.