Summary: A new transmission strategy based on distributed event-triggered mechanism and average dwell time approach is proposed for consensus of time-delay free linear multi-agent systems with communication constraints. A subset of agents are selected according to the condition of event-triggered mechanism to communicate with its adjacent agents through network channel at certain sampling instant, which reduces the occupation of network bandwidth. The possible combinations of agents’ communication are considered as modes of multi-agent systems. Therefore, we modelled multi-agent systems as a class of switched systems. The average dwell time method is applied to determine its dwell-time of each mode, which avoids the frequent mode-switching resulted from event-triggered mechanism. An integrated design scheme is presented to achieve the thresholds of event-triggered mechanism, the average dwell time and the consensus controller gain simultaneously by using Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional and linear matrix inequality (LMI) technique. Finally, a simulation example illustrates the effectiveness of theoretical results.