Synchronization of Complex Dynamical Networks Subject to DoS Attacks: An Improved Coding–Decoding Protocol

This article investigates the synchronization of communication-constrained complex dynamic networks subject to malicious attacks. An observer-based controller is designed by virtue of the bounded encode sequence derived from an improved coding–decoding communication protocol. Moreover, taking the security of data transmission into consideration, the denial-of-service attacks with the frequency and duration characterized by the average dwell-time constraint are introduced into data communication, and their influence on the coder string is analyzed explicitly. Thereafter, by imposing reasonable restrictions on the transmission protocol and the occurrence of attacks, the boundedness of coding intervals can be obtained. Since the precision of data is generally limited, it may lead to the situation that the signal to be encoded overflows the coding interval such that it results in the unavailability of the developed coding scheme. To cope with this problem, a dynamic variable is introduced to the design of the protocol. Subsequently, based on the Lyapunov stability theory, sufficient conditions for ensuring the input-to-state stability of the synchronization error systems under the communication-constrained condition and malicious attacks are presented. The validity of the developed method is finally verified by a simulation example of chaotic networks.