  Dual decomposition has been successfully employed in a variety of distributed
convex optimization problems solved by a network of computing and communicating
nodes. Often, when the cost function is separable but the constraints are
coupled, the dual decomposition scheme involves local parallel subgradient
calculations and a global subgradient update performed by a master node. In
this paper, we propose a consensus-based dual decomposition to remove the need
for such a master node and still enable the computing nodes to generate an
approximate dual solution for the underlying convex optimization problem. In
addition, we provide a primal recovery mechanism to allow the nodes to have
access to approximate near-optimal primal solutions. Our scheme is based on a
constant stepsize choice and the dual and primal objective convergence are
achieved up to a bounded error floor dependent on the stepsize and on the
number of consensus steps among the nodes.
