A detection and rerouting mechanism for platoon control of non-linear autonomous vehicles under denial of service attacks

This paper presents a novel detection and rerouting mechanism for distributed adaptive platoon control of non-linear autonomous connected vehicles under denial of service (DoS) attacks. DoS attacks can cause delays or losses of data packets due to blocked communication channels, leading to reducing platoon performance or even collisions among vehicles. To tackle this issue, the proposed mechanism detects and reroutes communication topology depending on the real-time topology and the number of link failures. Real-time detection divides the scenario of DoS attacks into three parts. According to the different scenarios, rerouting mechanisms will be utilized. A controller adapted to real-time variable communication topology is also designed in this scheme. The adjacency matrix of the real-time communication topology generated by the rerouting mechanism is used to update the controller so that the platoon can remain in a stable state without being affected by DoS attacks. In addition, the sliding mode controller and the observer are designed by solving linear matrix inequalities, and the platoon stability and internal stability are proven. Numerical simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed mechanism and control design can reduce the vehicle state estimate error and platoon-tracking error to ideal states under DoS attacks. The proposed method solves the problem that the existing methods have not considered the number of link failures and the inability to restore communication when the communication topology is paralyzed.