The Small-Talk Effect in Practical Synchronization of Heterogeneous Oscillating Dynamics

This paper investigates multi-time scale commu- nication schemes in synchronization of heterogeneous Lienard oscillator systems. Existing results rely on global exchange of information for all networked systems at discrete time instants, providing limited flexibility in adjusting the trade-off between communication rate and synchronization performance. A scheme to investigate how global updates are complemented by more frequent local interactions within a sub-network is thus proposed in this paper. For a prescribed bound on the synchronization error, conditions are derived under which the global and local update rates can be selected as design parameters. A numerical example illustrates the beneficial effect of the local interactions.