Dynamic Quantized Consensus of General Linear Multiagent Systems Under Denial-of-Service Attacks

In this article, we study multiagent consensus problems under Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks with data rate constraints. We first consider the leaderless consensus problem and after that we briefly present the analysis of leader–follower consensus. The dynamics of the agents take general forms modeled as homogeneous linear time-invariant systems. In our analysis, we derive lower bounds on the data rate for the multiagent systems to achieve leaderless and leader–follower consensus in the presence of DoS attacks, under which the issue of overflow of quantizer is prevented. The main contribution of the article is the characterization of the tradeoff between the tolerable DoS attack levels for leaderless and 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 with zooming-in and zooming-out capabilities for avoiding quantizer saturation.

I. Introduction

In The last two decades, the control of multiagent systems has attracted substantial attention due to the progress of technologies in communication and computation areas. Some of the key applications can be found in formation control, control of large-scale systems, and distributed sensor networks [1]. In particular, these days, a closed-loop control system integrates sensors, computers, and communication devices, which complies with the concept of cyber-physical systems (CPSs). While the industry notably benefits from the technology bloom in CPSs, a challenging situation also emerges along with the benefits due to malicious cyber attacks on CPSs [2]–[5], in the form of, e.g., deceptive attacks and Denial-of-Service (DoS).