Rate-Coded Secure Control for Multiagent Systems

In this article, a rate-coded secure control is investigated for the consensus of multiagent systems (MASs). The challenge lies in how to design a broadcasting protocol when the communication bit is critical, and to strengthen its security at the same time. A novel rate-coded algorithm is designed for MASs from an encoding–decoding viewpoint, where only an encrypted <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L$</tex-math></inline-formula>-length codeword, instead of the sensitive system information, is transmitted over the network between each agent and its neighbors whenever the triggering condition is satisfied. Unlike most existing results, our algorithm's triggering condition is correlated with the changing rate of the transmitted signal, effectively alleviating the signal distortion problem when its changing rate is too small or too large. As a result, the proposed rate-coded secure control not only ensures uniformly bounded consensus outcomes without continuous monitoring of neighbors' states but also reduces bandwidth requirements and enhances communication security. Finally, simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of our theoretical finding.