Abstract

Average consensus is a widely used algorithm for distributed computing and control, where all the agents in the network constantly communicate and update their states in order to achieve an agreement. This approach could result in an undesirable disclosure of information on the initial state of an agent to the other agents. In this paper, we propose a privacy preserving average consensus algorithm to guarantee the privacy of the initial state and asymptotic consensus on the exact average of the initial values, by adding and subtracting random noises to the consensus process. We characterize the mean square convergence rate of our consensus algorithm and derive the covariance matrix of the maximum likelihood estimate on the initial state. Moreover, we prove that our proposed algorithm is optimal in the sense that it does not disclose any information more than necessary to achieve the average consensus. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design.

In this paper we study the effect of false data injection attacks on state estimation carried over a sensor network monitoring a discrete-time linear time-invariant Gaussian system. The steady state Kalman filter is used to perform state estimation while a failure detector is employed to detect anomalies in the system. An attacker wishes to compromise the integrity of the state estimator by hijacking a subset of sensors and sending altered readings. In order to inject fake sensor measurements without being detected the attacker will need to carefully design his actions to fool the estimator as abnormal sensor measurements would result in an alarm. It is important for a designer to determine the set of all the estimation biases that an attacker can inject into the system without being detected, providing a quantitative measure of the resilience of the system to such attacks. To this end, we will provide an ellipsoidal algorithm to compute its inner and outer approximations of such set. A numerical example is presented to further illustrate the effect of false data injection attack on state estimation.

No abstract

We propose an open-loop and a closed-loop stochastic event-triggered sensor schedule for remote state estimation. Both schedules overcome the essential difficulties of existing schedules in recent literature works where, through introducing a deterministic event-triggering mechanism, the Gaussian property of the innovation process is destroyed which produces a challenging nonlinear filtering problem that cannot be solved unless approximation techniques are adopted. The proposed stochastic event-triggered sensor schedules eliminate such approximations. Under these two schedules, the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimator and its estimation error covariance matrix at the remote estimator are given in a closed-form. The stability in terms of the expected error covariance and the sample path of the error covariance for both schedules is studied. We also formulate and solve an optimization problem to obtain the minimum communication rate under some estimation quality constraint using the open-loop sensor schedule. A numerical comparison between the closed-loop MMSE estimator and a typical approximate MMSE estimator with deterministic eventtriggered sensor schedule, in a problem setting of target tracking, shows the superiority of the proposed sensor schedule.