Distributed observer for LTI systems under stochastic impulsive sequential attacks

In this paper, we consider the distributed state estimation problem of continuous-time linear time-invariant (LTI) systems, where communication channels are attacked by stochastic impulsive sequences. In a networked system, the communication channel between an agent and its neighbor is vulnerable to being attacked. Continuous attacks have been widely studied so far, but with the development of attack techniques, intermittent attacks have been emerging, which are more difficult to be identified and detected, and have not been well portrayed and studied. Therefore, this paper investigates a random intermittent injection attack, which leads to abrupt and random changes of the state information transmitted by the neighbors. First, this attack is modeled as a stochastic impulsive sequential attack, where both its impulsive time and impulsive intensity are random. Then a distributed observer under stochastic impulsive sequential attack is proposed. Since the impulsive attack destroys the stability of the system, in order to attenuate the impact of the impulsive attack, a large feedback gain is necessary. By using the graph theory, matrix theory and stochastic analysis, sufficient conditions for the existence of the distributed observer in the sense of mean square and in the sense of almost sure are presented, respectively. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed distributed observer is verified by numerical simulations.