McGill Computer Networks Research Lab

This paper presents greedy gossip with eavesdropping (GGE), a new average consensus algorithm for wireless sensor network applications. Consensus algorithms have recently received much attention in the sensor network community because of their simplicity and completely decentralized nature which makes them robust to changes in the network topology and unreliable wireless networking environments. In the sensor network, each node has a measurement value and the aim of average consensus is computing the average of these node values in the absence of a central authority. We prove that GGE converges to the average consensus with probability one. We also illustrate the performance of the algorithm via simulations and conclude that GGE provides a significant performance improvement compared to existing average consensus algorithms such as randomized gossip and geographic gossip.