  We consider the problem of solving a distributed optimization problem using a
distributed computing platform, where the communication in the network is
limited: each node can only communicate with its neighbours and the channel has
a limited data-rate. A common technique to address the latter limitation is to
apply quantization to the exchanged information. We propose two distributed
optimization algorithms with an iteratively refining quantization design based
on the inexact proximal gradient method and its accelerated variant. We show
that if the parameters of the quantizers, i.e. the number of bits and the
initial quantization intervals, satisfy certain conditions, then the
quantization error is bounded by a linearly decreasing function and the
convergence of the distributed algorithms is guaranteed. Furthermore, we prove
that after imposing the quantization scheme, the distributed algorithms still
exhibit a linear convergence rate, and show complexity upper-bounds on the
number of iterations to achieve a given accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate the
performance of the proposed algorithms and the theoretical findings for solving
a distributed optimal control problem.
