Defense against underwater spy-robots: A distributed anti-theft topology control mechanism for insecure UASN

Abstract

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network (UASN) is deployed for various underwater applications, such as underwater creature tracking and underwater tactical surveillance. Particularly, UASN in military applications could be invaded by some underwater spy-robots termed eavesdroppers. The eavesdroppers navigate around some anchored nodes of UASN and eavesdrop on their communication channels silently. The anchored nodes are difficult to perceive the adjacent eavesdroppers, because the eavesdroppers never actively communicate with others. Thus, the anchored nodes could disseminate the data messages while they are blithely unaware of the adjacent eavesdroppers capturing the data messages. To reduce the theft ratio of data messages and guarantee the topology connectivity of UASN, an analysis framework regarding the theft ratio of data messages is first formulated, and then a geometric distribution is constructed for the in-degrees of anchored nodes. Furthermore, a binomial distribution for the communication ranges of anchored nodes is derived from this analysis framework. In our proposed Anti-Theft Topology Control Mechanism (ATTCM), the anchored nodes set the initial communication ranges according to the obtained binomial distribution, and then the communication ranges of anchored nodes are checked and adjusted to guarantee the topology connectivity. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of ATTCM, i.e., ATTCM can reduce the theft ratio of data messages effectively, and it can guarantee that there is at least one available communication path from each anchored node to the surface sink.