Fault detection and isolation of malicious nodes in MIMO Multi-hop Control Networks

A MIMO Multi-hop Control Network (MCN) consists of a MIMO LTI system where the communication between sensors, actuators and computational units is supported by a (wireless) multi-hop communication network, and data flow is performed using scheduling and routing of sensing and actuation data. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the plant dynamics and on the communication protocol configuration such that the Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) problem of failures and malicious attacks to communication nodes can be solved.Comment: 6 page

A virtual actuator approach for the secure control of networked LPV systems under pulse-width modulated DoS attacks

In this paper, we formulate and analyze the problem of secure control in the context of networked linear parameter varying (LPV) systems. We consider an energy-constrained, pulse-width modulated (PWM) jammer, which corrupts the control communication channel by performing a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. In particular, the malicious attacker is able to erase the data sent to one or more actuators. In order to achieve secure control, we propose a virtual actuator technique under the assumption that the behavior of the attacker has been identified. The main advantage brought by this technique is that the existing components in the control system can be maintained without need of retuning them, since the virtual actuator will perform a reconfiguration of the plant, hiding the attack from the controller point of view. Using Lyapunov-based results that take into account the possible behavior of the attacker, design conditions for calculating the virtual actuators gains are obtained. A numerical example is used to illustrate the proposed secure control strategy.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Performance analysis with network-enhanced complexities: On fading measurements, event-triggered mechanisms, and cyber attacks

Copyright © 2014 Derui Ding et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Nowadays, the real-world systems are usually subject to various complexities such as parameter uncertainties, time-delays, and nonlinear disturbances. For networked systems, especially large-scale systems such as multiagent systems and systems over sensor networks, the complexities are inevitably enhanced in terms of their degrees or intensities because of the usage of the communication networks. Therefore, it would be interesting to (1) examine how this kind of network-enhanced complexities affects the control or filtering performance; and (2) develop some suitable approaches for controller/filter design problems. In this paper, we aim to survey some recent advances on the performance analysis and synthesis with three sorts of fashionable network-enhanced complexities, namely, fading measurements, event-triggered mechanisms, and attack behaviors of adversaries. First, these three kinds of complexities are introduced in detail according to their engineering backgrounds, dynamical characteristic, and modelling techniques. Then, the developments of the performance analysis and synthesis issues for various networked systems are systematically reviewed. Furthermore, some challenges are illustrated by using a thorough literature review and some possible future research directions are highlighted.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61134009, 61329301, 61203139, 61374127, and 61374010, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Work-in-Progress: A Formal Approach to Verify Fault Tolerance in Industrial Network Systems

Distributed systems are extremely difficult to design and implement correctly because they must handle both system correctness and device failures. Most of the work focuses on the first aspect, and in particular, on the correctness of security and network configuration. The large demand for availability and reliability for critical services is actually pushing new architectures that tolerate faults, but a-priori analysis of redundancy and recovery features is still limited. To this end, we present a framework to design and formally verify the persistence of network properties, even in case of failures. The solution considers both nodes and links failure, and it is based on a formal model that takes both network topology and network device configurations into account. In contrast, most of the existing approaches only consider network topology. By analyzing the formal model, the framework can check whether the specified network services are still available after failures, and in case of success, it outputs a possible configuration of the devices to be used for automatic recovery

Bibliographic Review on Distributed Kalman Filtering

In recent years, a compelling need has arisen to understand the effects of distributed information structures on estimation and filtering. In this paper, a bibliographical review on distributed Kalman filtering (DKF) is provided.\ud The paper contains a classification of different approaches and methods involved to DKF. The applications of DKF are also discussed and explained separately. A comparison of different approaches is briefly carried out. Focuses on the contemporary research are also addressed with emphasis on the practical applications of the techniques. An exhaustive list of publications, linked directly or indirectly to DKF in the open literature, is compiled to provide an overall picture of different developing aspects of this area

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future