Resilient Consensus Protocol in the Presence of Trusted Nodes

Abstract—In this paper, we propose a scheme for a resilient distributed consensus problem through a set of trusted nodes within the network. Currently, algorithms that solve resilient consensus problem de-mand networks to have high connectivity to overrule the effects of adversaries, or require nodes to have access to some non-local information. In our scheme, we incorporate the notion of trusted nodes to guarantee distributed consensus despite any number of adversar-ial attacks, even in sparse networks. A subset of nodes, which are more secured against the attacks, constitute a set of trusted nodes. It is shown that the network be-comes resilient against any number of attacks whenever the set of trusted nodes form a connected dominating set within the network. We also study a relationship between trusted nodes and the network robustness. Simulations are presented to illustrate and compare our scheme with the existing ones. Index Terms—Resilience, consensus, graph robust-ness, adversary, dominating set. I