Optimal Attack Strategy Against Wireless Networked Control Systems With Proactive Channel Hopping

This article investigates the security issue based on the proactive channel hopping scheme in wireless networked control systems (WNCS), where the sensor sends the measurement data to the controller through multiple channels attacked by a periodic denial-of-service jammer. For a jammer with the limited energy, the number of attacks, which denotes the amount of time expended in launching the attack, increases with the decline in the channel number attacked at each time, which has an effect on the success of receiving the data. On the basis of this, the problem of making an optimal tradeoff between the channel number attacked at each time and the attack number to degrade the WNCS performance maximally is investigated. We formulate this problem as an integer programming problem based on the linear quadratic Gaussian control cost function. Then, a necessary condition of the optimal solution without integrality constraints for this optimization problem is given for the scenario where the sensor utilizes one channel at each time to perform the data transmission. We further investigate this problem for the case where the sensor can select several channels at each time to transmit the measurement data. Moreover, for both cases the corresponding algorithms are presented to approximate optimal schedules. Finally, the theoretical results and the validity of the algorithm proposed are verified via the numerical results.