Secure Consensus with Distributed Detection via Two-hop Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces two distributed detection schemes for resilient consensus in multi-agent networks with malicious nodes, leveraging two-hop communication to improve detection effectiveness under less restrictive network conditions.

Contribution

It proposes novel distributed malicious node detection schemes utilizing two-hop communication, reducing connectivity requirements for resilient consensus.

Findings

Detection schemes are effective under certain network connectivity conditions.

Proposed methods require less stringent network connectivity than traditional algorithms.

Numerical simulations demonstrate improved performance in wireless sensor networks.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a multi-agent resilient consensus problem, where some of the nodes may behave maliciously. The approach is to equip all nodes with a scheme to detect neighboring nodes when they behave in an abnormal fashion. To this end, the nodes exchange not only their own states but also information regarding their neighbor nodes. Such two-hop communication has long been studied in fault-tolerant algorithms in computer science. We propose two distributed schemes for detection of malicious nodes and resilient consensus with different requirements on resources for communication and the structures of the networks. In particular, the detection schemes become effective under certain connectivity properties in the network so that the non-malicious nodes can share enough information about their neighbors. It is shown that the requirements are however less stringent than those for conventional algorithms. A numerical example is presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods in wireless sensor networks.