  Measures of node centrality that describe the importance of a node within a
network are crucial for understanding the behavior of social networks and
graphs. In this paper, we address the problems of distributed estimation and
control of node centrality in undirected graphs with asymmetric weight values.
In particular, we focus our attention on $\alpha$-centrality, which can be seen
as a generalization of eigenvector centrality. In this setting, we first
consider a distributed protocol where agents compute their $\alpha$-centrality,
focusing on the convergence properties of the method; then, we combine the
estimation method with a consensus algorithm to achieve a consensus value
weighted by the influence of each node in the network. Finally, we formulate an
$\alpha$-centrality control problem which is naturally decoupled and, thus,
suitable for a distributed setting and we apply this formulation to protect the
most valuable nodes in a network against a targeted attack, by making every
node in the network equally important in terms of {\alpha}-centrality.
Simulations results are provided to corroborate the theoretical findings.
