  We study nonconvex distributed optimization in multiagent networks where the
communications between nodes is modeled as a time-varying sequence of arbitrary
digraphs. We introduce a novel broadcast-based distributed algorithmic
framework for the (constrained) minimization of the sum of a smooth (possibly
nonconvex and nonseparable) function, i.e., the agents' sum-utility, plus a
convex (possibly nonsmooth and nonseparable) regularizer. The latter is usually
employed to enforce some structure in the solution, typically sparsity. The
proposed method hinges on Successive Convex Approximation (SCA) techniques
coupled with i) a tracking mechanism instrumental to locally estimate the
gradients of agents' cost functions; and ii) a novel broadcast protocol to
disseminate information and distribute the computation among the agents.
Asymptotic convergence to stationary solutions is established. A key feature of
the proposed algorithm is that it neither requires the double-stochasticity of
the consensus matrices (but only column stochasticity) nor the knowledge of the
graph sequence to implement. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed
framework is the first broadcast-based distributed algorithm for convex and
nonconvex constrained optimization over arbitrary, time-varying digraphs.
Numerical results show that our algorithm outperforms current schemes on both
convex and nonconvex problems.
