Online Stabilization of Unknown Networked Systems with Communication Constraints

We investigate the problem of stabilizing an unknown networked linear system under communication constraints and adversarial disturbances. We propose the first provably stabilizing algorithm for the problem. The algorithm uses a distributed version of nested convex body chasing to maintain a consistent estimate of the network dynamics and applies system level synthesis to determine a distributed controller based on this estimated model. Our approach avoids the need for system identification and accommodates a broad class of communication delay while being fully distributed and scaling favorably with the number of subsystems in the network.