Cyber-Resilient Self-Triggered Distributed Control of Networked Microgrids Against Multi-Layer DoS Attacks

TL;DR

This paper develops a cyber-resilient self-triggered control method for networked microgrids that maintains frequency synchronization despite multi-layer DoS cyber attacks, using a novel data flow persistence concept.

Contribution

It introduces a unified PoDF concept to quantify multi-layer DoS effects and proposes an adaptive control scheme to enhance cyber resilience in microgrid synchronization.

Findings

The proposed control preserves consensus under specific DoS conditions.

The online adaptive scheme improves robustness against worst-case attacks.

Case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.

Abstract

Networked microgrids with high penetration of distributed generators have ubiquitous remote information exchange, which may be exposed to various cyber security threats. This paper, for the first time, addresses a consensus problem in terms of frequency synchronisation in networked microgrids subject to multi-layer denial of service (DoS) attacks, which could simultaneously affect communication, measurement and control actuation channels. A unified notion of Persistency-of-Data-Flow (PoDF) is proposed to characterise the data unavailability in different information network links, and further quantifies the multi-layer DoS effects on the hierarchical system. With PoDF, we provide a sufficient condition of the DoS attacks under which the consensus can be preserved with the proposed edge-based self-triggered distributed control framework. In addition, to mitigate the conservativeness of offline design against the worst-case attack across all agents, an online self-adaptive scheme of the control parameters is developed to fully utilise the latest available information of all data transmission channels. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed cyber-resilient self-triggered distributed control is verified by representative case studies.