Resilient Synchronization of Pulse-Coupled Oscillators under Stealthy Attacks

Abstract

Abstract This paper studies a clock synchronization problem for wireless sensor networks employing pulse-based communication when some of the nodes are faulty or even adversarial. The objective is to design resilient distributed algorithms for the nonfaulty nodes to keep the influence of the malicious nodes minimal and to arrive at synchronization in a safe manner. Compared with conventional approaches, our algorithm is more capable in the sense that it is applicable to networks taking noncomplete graph structures, and moreover it is deterministic. Our method extends the class of mean subsequence reduced (MSR) algorithms from the area of multi-agent consensus. First, we provide a simple detection method to find malicious nodes that transmit pulses irregularly. Then, we demonstrate that in the presence of adversaries capable to avoid being detected, the normal nodes can reach synchronization by ignoring suspicious pulses. We illustrate the effectiveness of our result by a numerical example.