Bipartite Consensus in the Presence of Denial of Service Adversary

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a DoS adversary can optimally disrupt bipartite consensus in a network of agents with cooperative and antagonistic interactions, by formulating and solving an optimal control problem.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optimal control framework to determine the best attack strategy against bipartite consensus under DoS conditions.

Findings

Derived the optimal attack strategy for DoS adversaries.

Showed how link-breaking impacts bipartite consensus convergence.

Provided insights into network robustness against malicious disruptions.

Abstract

Attacks on a set of agents with cooperative and antagonistic interactions attempting to achieve linear bipartite consensus are considered here. In bipartite consensus, two clusters are formed, agents in each cluster converging to a final state which is negative of the other cluster's final state. The adversary seeks to slow down the bipartite consensus by a Denial of Service (DoS) type attack where the attacker has the capability to break a specific number of links at each time instant. The problem is formulated as an optimal control problem and the optimal strategy for the adversary is determined.