IoT-Based Cyber-Physical Communication Architecture: Challenges and Research Directions

In order to provide intelligent services, the Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates millions of smart cyber-physical devices to be enabled with network connectivity to sense, collect, process, and exchange information. Unfortunately, the traditional communication infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber attacks and link failures, so it is a challenging task for the IoT to explore these applications. In order to begin research and contribute into the IoT-based cyber-physical digital world, one will need to know the technical challenges and research opportunities. In this study, several key technical challenges and requirements for the IoT communication systems are identified. Basically, privacy, security, intelligent sensors/actuators design, low cost and complexity, universal antenna design, and friendly smart cyber-physical system design are the main challenges for the IoT implementation. Finally, the authors present a diverse set of cyber-physical communication system challenges such as practical implementation, distributed state estimation, real-time data collection, and system identification, which are the major issues require to be addressed in implementing an efficient and effective IoT communication system

Denial-of-service power dispatch against linear quadratic control via a fading channel

This paper addresses the secure control problem of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) under Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack with power constraint. The purpose of the attacker is to degenerate the control performance of CPSs at the reduced cost of attack power. Unlike the existing works developed under the assumption of time-invariant channel states, the sensor-to-estimator communication channel under consideration is a standard block fading communication channel. By taking the angle of DoS attacker, an optimization problem is formulated to deal with both the linear quadratic control cost of CPS and the expenditure of attack power. Then the formulated problem is transformed into a Markov decision problem. As it is difficult to provide an analytical expression of optimal attack power, the objective function is approximated to derive an analytical expression of suboptimal attack power. Next the attack strategies for two specific communication schemes, namely, capacity achieving coding scheme and forward error correction scheme, are studied. Finally, the validity of the proposed attack strategy is demonstrated by an illustrative example