Delay and DoS Resilient Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems: A Bit Rate Minimization Strategy

This paper investigates the consensus issue of multi-agent systems under constrained data rates, time delays, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. We first introduce a periodically adjusted dynamic quantizer based on the equally distributed bit rate model, which can effectively avoid saturation and eliminate the quantization error over time, unlike the static quantizer. Then, we show that the quantizer in this paper is suitable for multi-agent systems with time delays, and we design a quantized controller that can realize the consensus in such systems. We also derive the sufficient bit rate condition for achieving consensus under time delays. Next, we extend our approach to handle multi-agent systems with both time delays and DoS attacks under the general energy-constrained DoS model. We provide the conditions on bit rate and average duration and frequency of DoS attacks that ensure system performance. Finally, we analyze the relationship between system performance, bit rate, time delays, and DoS attacks, and verify our results by numerical examples. © 2025 IEEE.