Dynamic Quantized Leader-follower Consensus under Denial-of-Service Attacks

This paper investigates the multi-agent leader- follower consensus problem under Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks with data rate constraints. In our analysis, we first derive a lower bound on the data rate for the leader-follower consensus problem, which can guarantee the quantizers of the leader and followers do not overflow at any time, even in the presence of DoS attacks. The main contribution of the paper is the characterization of the trade-off between the tolerable DoS attack levels for leader-follower consensus and the required data rates for the quantizers during the communication attempts among the agents. To mitigate the influence of DoS attacks, we employ dynamic quantization mechanism with scale-up and scale-down capabilities. This paper also reveals the another trade-off between the data rate for the leader state quantization and the one for the follower state quantization. This makes saving the overall communication load and maintaining the resilience possible.

I. Introduction

The research of multi-agent system control have drawn substantial attentions from both the academic and industry communities. The application of multi-agent system control can be found during our daily life such as the control of drones, control of large-scale systems and distributed sensor networks, to name a few [1]. Recently, the concept of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) triggers the interests of researchers and is considered to be one of the key factors in the realization of Industry 4.0. While the industry notably benefits from the technology bloom in CPSs, a challenging situation also emerges along with the benefits, malicious cyber attacks on CPSs such as deceptive attacks and Denial- of-Service (DoS) [2], [3].