Consensus in Multi-Agent System Under Aperiodic Denial-of-Service Attacks

In this work, the consensus problem of networked agents under denial-of-service (DoS) attacks is studied. Due to DoS attacks, communication channels would be intermittently congested, which inevitably affects the state update in the consensus process and leads to the failure of a consensus protocol. Such a situation has been recast into a consensus problem with on-off control, as suggested by other studies. However, it is commonly assumed that the underlying graph is undirected and the DoS attack follows certain periodic patterns. Obviously, these assumptions cannot truly reflect some real cases. Therefore, aperiodic attacks and directed topology are considered here. Our theoretical results reveal that consensus is achievable, provided that the average of the DoS attack duration over a certain length of time interval is upper bounded. Compared with other existing results, this new consensus criterion demonstrates better generality and tractability. Finally, simulations are presented to further demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.