Data Rates for Stabilizing Control under Denial-of-Service Attacks

Abstract: We study communication-constrained networked control problems for linear time-invariant systems in the presence of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, namely attacks that prevent transmissions over the communication network. Our work aims at exploring the relationship between system resilience and network bandwidth capacity. Given a class of DoS attacks, we first characterize time-invariant bit-rate bounds that are dependent on the unstable eigenvalues of the dynamic matrix of the plant and the parameters of DoS attacks, beyond which exponential stability of the closed-loop system can be guaranteed. Second, we design the time-varying bit-rate protocol and show that it can enable the system to maintain the comparable robustness as the one under the time-invariant bit-rate protocol and meanwhile promote the possibility of transmitting fewer bits especially when the attack levels are low. Our characterization clearly shows the trade-off between the communication bandwidth and resilience against DoS. An example is given to illustrate the proposed solution approach.