Wireless Distributed Consensus for Connected Autonomous Systems

Connected critical autonomous systems (C-CASs) are envisioned to significantly change our life and work styles through emerging vertical applications, such as autonomous vehicles and cooperative robots. However, as the scale of the connected nodes continues to grow, their heterogeneity and cybersecurity threats are more eminent, and conventional centralized communications and decision-making methodology are reaching their limit. This article is the first exploration of a trustworthy and fault-tolerant framework for C-CAS for achieving hyperreliable global decision making in a trustless environment, where the connected sensors/nodes are less reliable due to either communication failure or local decision error (e.g., by sensing algorithm/AI, etc.). The proposed framework is based on two iconic distributed consensus (DC) mechanisms: 1) practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) and 2) Raft, under the proposed perception-initiative-consensus-action (PICA) protocol with wireless connections among the nodes. We first analytically derived consensus reliability in six different system models. The other fundamental performance metrics, such as the consensus throughput and latency, node scalability, and reliability gain are also analytically derived. These analytical results provide basic design guidelines for wireless DC (WDC) usage in the C-CAS systems. The results show that WDC significantly improves overall system reliability with the increasing number of participating nodes.