Optimal denial‐of‐service attack scheduling for remote state estimation with time‐varying interference power

Abstract

This article examines resource scheduling optimization for cyber‐physical systems that include a smart sensor, a remote estimator, and an attacker. The attacker's objective is to use denial‐of‐service (DoS) attack to jam the wireless channel, causing packet loss and reducing system performance. We consider a more realistic scenario where other interfering sources exist and conduct research based on the signal‐to‐interference‐plus‐noise ratio (SINR) model. Through this model, we investigate two cases: constant high or low interference power and time‐varying interference power. Different levels of attack power lead to varying packet loss rates, and the same attack power may result in different packet loss rates in different interference environments. Therefore, the attacker needs to consider the impact of other interferences to find the optimal attack strategy that increases the estimation error of the information‐physical system while reducing energy consumption. We describe this optimization problem in a Markov decision process (MDP) framework and demonstrate the existence of an optimal deterministic Markovian strategy. We also establish the monotonicity of the optimal strategy in two different cases and investigate the extreme case. Simulation results support our theoretical results.