  We address the problem of distributed uncon- strained convex optimization
under separability assumptions, i.e., the framework where each agent of a
network is endowed with a local private multidimensional convex cost, is
subject to communication constraints, and wants to collaborate to compute the
minimizer of the sum of the local costs. We propose a design methodology that
combines average consensus algorithms and separation of time-scales ideas. This
strategy is proved, under suitable hypotheses, to be globally convergent to the
true minimizer. Intuitively, the procedure lets the agents distributedly
compute and sequentially update an approximated Newton- Raphson direction by
means of suitable average consensus ratios. We show with numerical simulations
that the speed of convergence of this strategy is comparable with alternative
optimization strategies such as the Alternating Direction Method of
Multipliers. Finally, we propose some alternative strategies which trade-off
communication and computational requirements with convergence speed.
