Collective Behavior Coordination and Aggregation with Low-Cost Communication

An important natural phenomenon surfaces that satisfactory synchronization of self-driven particles can be achieved via remarkably reduced communication cost, especially for high density particle groups with low external noise. Statistical numerical evidence illustrates that a highly efficient manner is to distribute the communication messages as evenly as possible along the whole dynamic process, since it minimizes the communication redundancy. More surprisingly, it is discovered that there exists an abnormal region in the state diagram where moderately decreasing the communication cost can even improve the synchronization performance. Significantly, another interesting fact is found that low-cost communication can help the particles aggregate into synchronized clusters, which may be beneficial to explain the forming mechanism of individuals’ aggregation phenomena over biological flocks/swarms.