A Trust Model for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks Based on Fast Link Quality Assessment

Abstract

With the widespread use of Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) in marine monitoring, disaster prevention and other fields. In recent years, researchers have gradually paid more attention to the security issues of UASNs. Because of the development environment is inaccessible and severely hostile, UASNs are vulnerable to various security threats, such as selective forwarding attacks and DoS attacks [1]. In recent years, the trust model has been recognized as an effective way to defend against the internal attacks in the terrestrial networks. However, it is not feasible to apply these trust models directly in UASNs, because the underwater environment has the characteristics that signal attenuation and the communication quality of channel will change with the environment. The communication quality of the underwater link is unstable, and the poor quality of the link will have a negative impact on the trust value of the nodes. In this paper, we propose a new trust model for stable and accurate node trust evaluation in UASNs. A fast link quality assessment method which is suitable for UASNs with limited node energy and computing ability was adopted. Based on the analysis of the effects of various internal attacks, three types of trust evidence were selected to accurately calculate the trust value of nodes.