Optimal Denial-of-Service attack energy management against state estimation over an SINR-based network

We consider a scenario in which a DoS attacker with the limited power resource and the purpose of degrading the system performance, jams a wireless network through which the packet from a sensor is sent to a remote estimator. To degrade the estimation quality most effectively with a given energy budget, the attacker aims to solve the problem of how much power to obstruct the channel each time, which is the recently proposed optimal attack energy management problem. The existing works are built on an ideal network model in which the packet dropout never occurs when the attack is absent. To encompass wireless transmission losses, we introduce the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio-based network. First we focus on the case when the attacker employs the constant power level. To maximize the expected terminal estimation error at the remote estimator, we provide some more relaxed sufficient conditions compared with the existing work for the existence of an explicit solution to the optimal static attack energy management problem and the solution is constructed. For the other important index of system performance, the average expected estimation error, the associated sufficient conditions are also derived based on a different analysis approach with the existing work. And a feasible method is presented for both indexes to seek the optimal constant attack power level when the system fails to meet the proposed sufficient conditions. Then when the real-time ACK information can be acquired, a Markov decision process (MDP) based algorithm is designed to solve the optimal dynamic attack energy management problem. We further study the optimal tradeoff between attack energy and system degradation. Specifically, by moving the energy constraint into the objective function to maximize the system index and minimize the energy consumption simultaneously, the other MDP based algorithm is proposed to find the optimal dynamic attack power policy which is further shown to have a monotone structure. The theoretical results are illustrated by simulations. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.