Optimal Denial-of-Service Attack Energy Management over an SINR-Based Network

Abstract

We consider a scenario in which a DoS attacker with the limited power resource jams a wireless network through which the packet from a sensor is sent to a remote estimator to estimate the system state. To degrade the estimation quality with power constraint, the attacker aims to solve how much power to obstruct the channel each time, which is the recently proposed optimal attack energy management problem. The existing works are built on an ideal link model in which the packet dropout never occurs without attack. To encompass wireless transmission losses, we introduce the SINR-based link. First, we focus on the case when the attacker employs the constant power level. To maximize the terminal error at the remote estimator, we provide some sufficient conditions for the existence of an explicit solution to the optimal static attack energy management problem and the solution is constructed. Compared with the existing result in which corresponding sufficient conditions work only when the system matrix is normal, the obtained conditions in this paper are viable for a general system and shown to be more relaxed. For the other system index, the average error, the associated sufficient conditions are also derived based on different analysis with the existing work. And a feasible method is presented for both indexes when the system cannot meet the sufficient conditions. Then when the real-time ACK information can be acquired, an MDP based algorithm is designed to solve the optimal dynamic attack energy management problem. We further study the optimal tradeoff between attack power and system degradation. By moving power constraint into the objective function to maximize system index and minimize energy consumption, the other MDP based algorithm is proposed to find the optimal attack policy which is further shown to have a monotone structure. The theoretical results are illustrated by simulations.