This paper investigate the distributed consensus problem for multi-agent systems with directed switching topologies that are subject to communication delays and finite data rate. By adopting a channel-based coding strategy with finite-level uniform quantizers, an effective distributed protocol is proposed, then using state augmentation technique, an enlarged closed-loop system without delays is obtained. Furthermore, the convergence analysis of the enlarged closed-loop system is conducted based on a novel input-to-output stability result. It is shown that, provided the duration of link failure in the directed switching network and the communication delays are bounded, then at each time instant, each agent (may be nonreciprocally) sends 5-level quantization information to each of its intimate neighbors, together with 3-level quantization information to itself suffices for ensuring consensus asymptotically.
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