Resilient stabilization of Multi-Hop Control Networks subject to malicious attacks

A Multi-hop Control Network (MCN) consists of a dynamical system where the communication between sensors, actuators and computational units is supported by a (wireless) multi-hop communication network and data flow is performed using scheduling and routing of sensing and actuation data. Secure stabilization of an MCN is a challenging open problem tightly related to Cyber-Physical Systems security. In this paper we address the co-design problem of controller and communication protocol of an MCN where the plant is a MIMO LTI system and the communication nodes are subject to failures and malicious attacks. We first characterize by means of necessary and sufficient conditions the set of network configurations that invalidate controllability and observability of the plant. Then, we investigate the problem of detecting and isolating failures and malicious attacks to communication nodes. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the solvability of this problem. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.