Fixed-time consensus tracking of nonlinear multi-agent systems under DoS attacks

This paper studies the fixed-time consensus tracking problem of nonlinear multi-agent systems, where communication links are subjected to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The DoS attacks make the communication networks switch arbitrarily and therefore the network connectivity may be broken, which poses a serious challenge to the consensus tracking problem within the fixed-time framework. To deal with this issue, a switching-based fixed-time control strategy is proposed. Critical conditions for fixed-time consensus tracking of nonlinear multi-agent systems under DoS attacks are developed. In particular, the adverse impact of DoS attacks on the settling time can be clearly reflected by the fixed-time strategy derived in this paper. Finally, numerical examples are provided to validate the theoretical analysis.