Randomized Transmission Protocols for Protection against Jamming Attacks in Multi-Agent Consensus

Abstract: Multi-agent consensus under jamming attacks is investigated. Specifically, inter-agent communications over a network are assumed to fail at certain times due to jamming of transmissions by a malicious attacker. A new stochastic communication protocol is proposed to achieve finite-time practical consensus between agents. In this protocol, communication attempt times of agents are randomized and unknown by the attacker until after the agents make their communication attempts. Through a probabilistic analysis, we show that the proposed communication protocol, when combined with a stochastic ternary control law, allows agents to achieve consensus regardless of the frequency of attacks. We demonstrate the efficacy of our results by considering two different strategies of the jamming attacker: a deterministic attack strategy and a more malicious communication-aware attack strategy.