Distributed secure leader-following consensus of multi-agent systems under DoS attacks and directed topology

This paper studies secure leader-following consensus of linear multi-agent systems under a directed communication network subject to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. We consider time-sequence-based DoS attacks allowed to occur aperiodically in an unknown attack strategy. The frequency and duration of DoS attacks are analyzed and investigated for a secure leader-following consensus problem. A distributed event-triggered control law is developed with scheduling of controller updating times determined in the presence of DoS attacks. It is proven that the agents can achieve secure leader-following consensus exponentially under the proposed distributed control scheme. The effectiveness of the developed methods is illustrated through two case studies: 1) distributed multi-robot coordination, and 2) distributed voltage regulation of power networks.