Optimal Byzantine attack strategy for distributed localisation with M ‐ary quantised data

Abstract

The distributed localisation with M-ary quantised data at sensor nodes is investigated in the presence of Byzantines from the attacker's perspective. The Byzantine nodes attack the network by transmitting falsified data to the fusion centre (FC) to deteriorate the performance of the distributed target localisation, where the independent and probabilistic Byzantine attack model is considered. By making the determinant of Fisher information matrix be zero, the optimal Byzantine attack strategy, which makes the FC incapable of estimating target location using the data at sensor nodes, is found. Numerical results show that the security performance of the distributed localisation improves sharply as the number of quantisation bits increases. Moreover, the security performance also increases tremendously as the attack probability decreases. Hence, the Byzantine attacker faces a trade-off between the performance damage and the hazard to be identified.