Data Rates for Stabilizing Control under Denial-of-Service Attacks

TL;DR

This paper investigates the relationship between network bandwidth and system resilience in control systems under DoS attacks, proposing bounds and protocols to maintain stability with minimal communication.

Contribution

It characterizes bit-rate bounds based on system dynamics and attack parameters, and designs adaptive protocols to optimize communication efficiency under DoS conditions.

Findings

Derived bounds for bit-rate ensuring stability under DoS attacks

Proposed adaptive bit-rate protocols maintaining robustness with fewer bits

Illustrated the trade-off between bandwidth and resilience with an example

Abstract

We study communication-constrained networked control problems for linear time-invariant systems in the presence of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, namely attacks that prevent transmissions over the communication network. Our work aims at exploring the relationship between system resilience and network bandwidth capacity. Given a class of DoS attacks, we first characterize time-invariant bit-rate bounds that are dependent on the unstable eigenvalues of the dynamic matrix of the plant and the parameters of DoS attacks, beyond which exponential stability of the closed-loop system can be guaranteed. Second, we design the time-varying bit-rate protocol and show that it can enable the system to maintain the comparable robustness as the one under the time-invariant bit-rate protocol and meanwhile promote the possibility of transmitting fewer bits especially when the attack levels are low. Our characterization clearly shows the trade-off between the communication bandwidth and resilience against DoS. An example is given to illustrate the proposed solution approach.