Resilient multi-dimensional consensus in adversarial environment

Abstract

This paper considers the multi-dimensional consensus in networked systems, where some of the agents might be misbehaving (or faulty). Despite the influence of these misbehaviors, the benign agents aim to reach an agreement while avoiding being seriously influenced by the faulty ones. To this end, this paper first considers a general class of consensus algorithms, where each benign agent computes an “auxiliary point” based on the received values and moves its state towards this point. Concerning this generic form, we present conditions for achieving resilient consensus and obtain a lower bound on the exponential convergence rate. Assuming that the number of malicious agents is upper bounded, two specific resilient consensus algorithms are further developed based on the obtained conditions. Particularly, the first solution, based on Helly’s Theorem, achieves the consensus within the convex hull formed by the benign agents’ initial states, where the auxiliary point can be efficiently computed through linear programming. On the other hand, the second algorithm serves as a “built-in” security guarantee for standard average consensus algorithms, in the sense that its performance coincides exactly with that of the standard ones in the absence of faulty nodes while also resisting the serious influence of the misbehaving ones in adversarial environment. Some numerical examples are provided in the end to verify the theoretical results.