Distributed Target Tracking under Byzantine Data Attacks

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the problem of distributed target tracking in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) under Byzantine data attacks. The dynamics of the target is defined by an evolution process. An M-ary quantizer is used at sensors to obtain local measurement data. With collected local measurement data from sensors in the network, the fusion center (FC) implements the target tracking process by using unscented kalman filter (UKF). For Byzantine nodes, the attack manner is described by the quantization process, the cascade of a normal mapping function and an attack function. We analyze the effect of Byzantine data attack on the performance of the distributed target tracking in terms of posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound (PCRLB). By making the FC obtain no information from both target state evolution model and reported data, we derive the condition to make the FC incapable of estimating the target location correctly and propose the corresponding strategy for the attacker. Numerical results show that the derived condition and proposed strategy can invalidate the distributed target tracking.