Software-Defined Event-Triggering Control for Large-Scale Networked Systems Subject to Stochastic Cyberattacks

In large-scale networked control systems (NCSs), an important issue is how to guarantee the system performance under the limited network bandwidth and stochastic cyberattacks. Centralized event-triggering mechanisms (ETMs) are now regarded as a desirable solution to ease the bandwidth pressure, but the application in large-scale NCSs is constrained by overall management complexity. In this article, we will first propose a software-defined centralized ETM to cost-efficiently conduct an event-triggering decision based on global system states to ensure system transmission performance. Then, by taking deception attacks, which can hardly be detected and pose serious threats to NCSs into account, we study a secure control problem over a large-scale NCS with the presented centralized ETM. The considered deception attacks compromise controller-to-actuator channels, and the specific behaviors of the attacks on different channels are depicted by different Bernoulli processes. To solve the problem, a formal model of the envisioned large-scale system is established, the sufficient conditions that achieve the uniformly ultimately bounded stability of the formulated system are analyzed, and then the controller gains are designed accordingly. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is finally validated by an illustrative example.