Distributed Consensus Tracking of Networked Agent Systems Under Denial-of-Service Attacks

• Published in: IEEE transactions on systems, man, and cybernetics. Systems Vol. 51; no. 10; pp. 6183 - 6196
• Main Authors: Wan, Ying, Wen, Guanghui, Yu, Xinghuo, Huang, Tingwen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Communication; Communication networks; Communications networks; Control equipment; Control systems; Control theory; Cyber-physical system (CPS); Denial of service attacks; denial-of-service (DoS) attacks; Denial-of-service attack; distributed consensus tracking; event-triggered control; Hybrid control; Linear matrix inequalities; Multi-agent systems; Multiple robots; networked system; Parameters; Physical layer; Symmetric matrices; Topology; Tracking problem
• ISSN: 2168-2216; 2168-2232
• DOI: 10.1109/TSMC.2019.2960301

Distributed consensus tracking problem of networked agent systems with directed topologies under denial-of-service (DoS) attacks is investigated. The considered networked agent network consists of a physical layer with fixed physical links and a cyber layer with cyber control units. Both the communication network connecting these two layers and the cyber communication network within the cyber layer may subject to malicious DoS attacks. These two types of attacks have different impacts on the networked system; the former one affects the timely update of control inputs, and the latter influences the connection weights of the cyber communication graph. First, for DoS signals occurring in the communication network which transmits the state and control input information between the two layers, the distributed control protocol based on the event-triggered scheme and locally deployed estimators are designed. Efficient algorithms for selecting event-triggered control parameters and Zeno-free triggered parameters are given to ensure the mean-square consensus. The relationships between the system's parameters and the features of DoS attacks are successfully revealed. Second, corresponding theoretical analysis is derived for consensus tracking of the networked systems when DoS attacks are launched within the cyber layer. Conditions concerning the length of repairing time and indexes of DoS attacks are given by utilizing hybrid control theory. At last, the effectiveness of the obtained results is demonstrated by performing simulations on multirobot systems.