Abstract
Secure time synchronization is one of the key concerns for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs). This paper presents a CLUster-based Secure Synchronization (CLUSS) protocol that ensures the security of synchronization under harsh underwater environments against various attacks, including Sybil attack, replay attack, message manipulation attack, and delay attack. The time synchronization process of CLUSS is divided into three phases: authentication phase, intercluster synchronization phase, and intracluster synchronization phase. During the authentication phase, cluster heads are authenticated to beacons and ordinary nodes are authenticated to cluster heads. During the process of intercluster and intracluster synchronization phases, CLUSS distinguishes the propagation delay of downlink from that of uplink caused by node movement in order to improve time synchronization accuracy. Moreover, part of these two phases can be executed concurrently for reducing the number of messages generated in synchronization. We demonstrate through simulations that CLUSS can reduce synchronization errors as well as energy consumption compared to traditional protocols in various circumstances.
Highlights
Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have a lot of potential application areas such as oceanographic data collection, disaster prevention, pollution monitoring, offshore exploration, and military surveillance [1,2,3]
Cluster heads are authenticated to beacons and ordinary nodes are authenticated to cluster heads
This paper proposed a CLUster-based Secure Synchronization (CLUSS) protocol that ensures the security of synchronization under harsh underwater environments against various attacks, including Sybil attack, replay attack, message manipulation attack, and delay attack
Summary
Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have a lot of potential application areas such as oceanographic data collection, disaster prevention, pollution monitoring, offshore exploration, and military surveillance [1,2,3]. Numerous time synchronization protocols have been proposed for terrestrial wireless sensor networks, such as RBS [9], TPSN [10], and FSTP [11]. They cannot be directly applied to UWSNs, because most of them assume negligible propagation delay among sensor nodes, which is not true in UWSNs. On the other hand, as UWSNs are often deployed in an inaccessible and hostile environment, those unattended sensor nodes are likely to incur many critical security attacks, including Sybil attack, replay attack, message manipulation attack, and delay attack [12, 13]. Time synchronization must resist modification attempts by attackers, especially in applications such as military surveillance and oceanographic data collection
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