Optimal DoS Attack Strategy against Remote State Estimation Over Lossy Networks

This paper considers a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack scheduling problem. Specifically, a sensor employs the wireless link to send the data packet to the remote estimator at each time step, while an energy-constrained attacker launches DoS attacks against the remote state estimation, and designs an optimal attack strategy to maximize damage to the remote estimation quality. The packet will drop if the channel is jammed. In most of the existing works on DoS attacks, it is assumed that the wireless channel is perfect, i.e., the packet dropout never occurs in the absence of attack. However, this is far from the practical situation. To encompass the lossy nature of wireless networks, we study the scenario of lossy networks in which the packet may drop even without attack, and construct the optimal attack strategy that maximizes the average expected estimation error at the remote estimator over lossy networks. Numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.