29,275 research outputs found
Secure Distributed Dynamic State Estimation in Wide-Area Smart Grids
Smart grid is a large complex network with a myriad of vulnerabilities,
usually operated in adversarial settings and regulated based on estimated
system states. In this study, we propose a novel highly secure distributed
dynamic state estimation mechanism for wide-area (multi-area) smart grids,
composed of geographically separated subregions, each supervised by a local
control center. We firstly propose a distributed state estimator assuming
regular system operation, that achieves near-optimal performance based on the
local Kalman filters and with the exchange of necessary information between
local centers. To enhance the security, we further propose to (i) protect the
network database and the network communication channels against attacks and
data manipulations via a blockchain (BC)-based system design, where the BC
operates on the peer-to-peer network of local centers, (ii) locally detect the
measurement anomalies in real-time to eliminate their effects on the state
estimation process, and (iii) detect misbehaving (hacked/faulty) local centers
in real-time via a distributed trust management scheme over the network. We
provide theoretical guarantees regarding the false alarm rates of the proposed
detection schemes, where the false alarms can be easily controlled. Numerical
studies illustrate that the proposed mechanism offers reliable state estimation
under regular system operation, timely and accurate detection of anomalies, and
good state recovery performance in case of anomalies
Randomized protocols for asynchronous consensus
The famous Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson impossibility proof shows that it is
impossible to solve the consensus problem in a natural model of an asynchronous
distributed system if even a single process can fail. Since its publication,
two decades of work on fault-tolerant asynchronous consensus algorithms have
evaded this impossibility result by using extended models that provide (a)
randomization, (b) additional timing assumptions, (c) failure detectors, or (d)
stronger synchronization mechanisms than are available in the basic model.
Concentrating on the first of these approaches, we illustrate the history and
structure of randomized asynchronous consensus protocols by giving detailed
descriptions of several such protocols.Comment: 29 pages; survey paper written for PODC 20th anniversary issue of
Distributed Computin
Lower Bounds for Achieving Synchronous Early Stopping Consensus with Orderly Crash Failures
In this paper, we discuss the consensus problem for synchronous distributed systems with orderly crash failures. For a synchronous distributed system of n processes with up to t crash failures and f failures actually occur, first, we present a bivalency argument proof to solve the open problem of proving the lower bound, min (t + 1, f + 2) rounds, for early-stopping synchronous consensus with orderly crash failures, where t < n - 1. Then, we extend the system model with orderly crash failures to a new model in which a process is allowed to send multiple messages to the same destination process in a round and the failing processes still respect the order specified by the protocol in sending messages. For this new model, we present a uniform consensus protocol, in which all non-faulty processes always decide and stop immediately by the end of f + 1 rounds. We prove that the lower bound of early stopping protocols for both consensus and uniform consensus are f + 1 rounds under the new model, and our proposed protocol is optimal.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA
Optimal Statistical Rates for Decentralised Non-Parametric Regression with Linear Speed-Up
We analyse the learning performance of Distributed Gradient Descent in the
context of multi-agent decentralised non-parametric regression with the square
loss function when i.i.d. samples are assigned to agents. We show that if
agents hold sufficiently many samples with respect to the network size, then
Distributed Gradient Descent achieves optimal statistical rates with a number
of iterations that scales, up to a threshold, with the inverse of the spectral
gap of the gossip matrix divided by the number of samples owned by each agent
raised to a problem-dependent power. The presence of the threshold comes from
statistics. It encodes the existence of a "big data" regime where the number of
required iterations does not depend on the network topology. In this regime,
Distributed Gradient Descent achieves optimal statistical rates with the same
order of iterations as gradient descent run with all the samples in the
network. Provided the communication delay is sufficiently small, the
distributed protocol yields a linear speed-up in runtime compared to the
single-machine protocol. This is in contrast to decentralised optimisation
algorithms that do not exploit statistics and only yield a linear speed-up in
graphs where the spectral gap is bounded away from zero. Our results exploit
the statistical concentration of quantities held by agents and shed new light
on the interplay between statistics and communication in decentralised methods.
Bounds are given in the standard non-parametric setting with source/capacity
assumptions
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