Generalizing Laplacian Controllability of Paths

Abstract

It is well known that if a network topology is a path or line and the states of vertices or nodes evolve according to the consensus policy, then the network is Laplacian controllable by an input connected to its terminal vertex. In this work a path is regarded as the resulting graph after interconnecting a finite number of two-vertex antiregular graphs and then possibly connecting one more vertex. It is shown that the single-input Laplacian controllability of a path can be extended to the case of interconnecting a finite number of $k$-vertex antiregular graphs with or without one more vertex appended, for any positive integer $k$. The methods to interconnect these antiregular graphs and to select the vertex for connecting the single input that renders the network Laplacian controllable are presented as well.