Towards a Secure Medium Access Control Protocol for Cluster-Based Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The unique characteristics of high bit error rate, low bandwidth, and long propagation delay in underwater environments pose significant challenges to the design of the medium access control (MAC) protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). Clustering is an effective and practical way to enhance the performance of UWSNs. In this paper, we propose a secure MAC protocol for cluster-based UWSNs, called SC-MAC, which aims to ensure the security of data transmission. In SC-MAC, the clusters are formed and updated dynamically and securely. We leverage MAC layer information by considering the link quality as well as residual energy of the modem's battery. After the successful mutual authentication, all sensor nodes from different clusters can protect the data transmission in the continuous communication. As the states of sensor nodes may not be observed accurately in a harsh underwater environment, we formulate the channel scheduling process as a stochastic partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) multiarmed bandit problem and derive the optimal channel scheduling rules hereby. Simulation results show that SC-MAC can perform better than existing state-of-the-art MAC protocols in terms of network throughput, successful delivery ratio, and energy consumption in various circumstances.

Challenges, Threats, Security Issues and New Trends of Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

“…In [ 28 ], an underwater media access control protocol based on the RTS/CTS mechanism with a cipher block chaining-message authentication code is proposed to provide data confidentiality, authenticity, and replay attack protection. In [ 29 ], a secure MAC protocol for cluster-based UWSNs is proposed to ensure the security of data transmission. A random nonce is used to prevent a replay attack, which is updated each time after the message was transmitted.…”

Cryptography in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks: A Survey and Research Directions

“…A secure transport protocol for WSN is proposed in [24], which employs an authentication mechanism to avoid the processing of fake control messages. A security defense mechanism in the MAC-layer is proposed in [25]. Overall, there are many works that have been proposed addressing security defenses in wireless sensor networks [26] and many of them may influence security protection in wireless multimedia sensor networks.…”

“…Secure protocols for data transmission and key management are desired for many scenarios, and security mechanisms for routing have also been proposed [23,88]. Moreover, some works have proposed secure protocols in the Transport [24] and MAC [25] layers. At last, integrated mechanisms for protection from different attacks, such as DoS [20], are also desired.…”

CCM-UW Security Modes for Low-band Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

“…In [17] Xu et al proposed a secure MAC protocol for cluster-based UWSNs, called SC-MAC, which aims to ensure the security of data transmission. In SC-MAC, the clusters are formed and updated dynamically and securely.…”