Capacity of Cooperative Fusion in the Presence of Byzantine Sensors

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the capacity limits of sensor fusion systems under Byzantine sensor attacks, showing that less than half Byzantine sensors do not reduce capacity, while half or more can completely disrupt information transmission.

Contribution

It provides an information-theoretic characterization of fusion capacity with Byzantine sensors and proposes a capacity-achieving strategy for the resilient case.

Findings

When less than half sensors are Byzantine, capacity remains unaffected.

Half or more Byzantine sensors can entirely prevent reliable communication.

A transmit-then-verify strategy achieves capacity when less than half are Byzantine.

Abstract

The problem of cooperative fusion in the presence of Byzantine sensors is considered. An information theoretic formulation is used to characterize the Shannon capacity of sensor fusion. It is shown that when less than half of the sensors are Byzantine, the effect of Byzantine attack can be entirely mitigated, and the fusion capacity is identical to that when all sensors are honest. But when at least half of the sensors are Byzantine, they can completely defeat the sensor fusion so that no information can be transmitted reliably. A capacity achieving transmit-then-verify strategy is proposed for the case that less than half of the sensors are Byzantine, and its error probability and coding rate is analyzed by using a Markov decision process modeling of the transmission protocol.