We introduce ScalableMax, a novel communication scheme for achieving max-consensus in a network of multiple agents which harnesses the interference in the wireless channel as well as its multicast capabilities. In a sufficiently dense network, the amount of communication resources required grows logarithmically with the number of nodes, while in state-of-theart approaches, this growth is at least linear. ScalableMax can handle additive noise and works well in a high SNR regime. For medium and low SNR, we propose the ScalableMax-EC scheme, which extends the ideas of ScalableMax by introducing a novel error correction scheme. It achieves lower error rates at the cost of using more channel resources. However, it preserves the logarithmic growth with the number of agents in the system.

The topic of this paper is achieving finite-time maxconsensus in a multi-agent system that communicates over a fading wireless channel and exploits its interference property. This phenomenon corrupts the desired information when data is transmitted synchronously. In fact, each transmitted signal is attenuated by an unknown and time-varying factor (fading coefficient), then, by interference, all such attenuated signals are summed up at a receiver. Rather than combatting interference, we design a communication system that exploits it. Our strategy yields a more efficient usage of wireless resources compared to other algorithms. By simultaneously accessing this communication system, each agent obtains a weighted average of the neighbouring agents' information states. With this piece of information at hand and with a switching consensus protocol employing broadcast authorisations for agents, max-consensus can be achieved within a finite number of iterations.

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