A resilient consensus protocol for networks with heterogeneous confidence and Byzantine adversaries

Abstract

A class of Adversary Robust Consensus protocols is proposed and analyzed. These are inherently nonlinear, distributed, continuous-time algorithms for multi-agents systems seeking to agree on a common value of a shared variable, in the presence of faulty or malicious Byzantine agents, disregarding protocol rules and communicating arbitrary possibly differing values to neighboring agents. We adopt monotone joint-agent interactions, a general mechanism for processing locally available information and allowing cross-comparisons between state-values of multiple agents simultaneously. The topological features of the network are abstracted as a Petri Net and convergence criteria for the resulting time evolutions formulated in terms of suitable structural properties of its invariants (so called siphons). Finally, simulation results and examples/counterexamples are discussed.