Towards Efficient Traffic Engineering and Secure Communication of Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Since communications in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have limited resources and capabilities, designing an efficient and reliable Media Access Control (MAC) protocol for UWSNs presents many challenges. UWSNs have limited bandwidth, power, memory, long propagation delay, high Bit Error Rate (BER), and unreliable communication. Current MAC protocols designed for Terrestrial Wireless Sensor Networks (TWSNs) are not suitable for UWSNs. Oil/gas pipeline and climate change prediction applications require real-time monitoring to reduce the total loss that results when oil spills and natural disasters occur. In our research, we first endeavored to construct a survey of the recent developments in MAC protocols in UWSNs, which included a discussion of the characteristics and limitations of each.

Subsequently, we developed an efficient MAC protocol to enhance underwater communication that addressed the limitations of the existing MAC protocols. Next, the proposed MAC protocol is presented and evaluated using NS2 simulation, followed by a comparison of the results of different MAC protocol approaches in terms of end-to-end delay, energy consumption, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), total number of collisions, throughput, and overhead. This research also highlights the design considerations to develop an ideal underwater MAC protocol for different applications, along with several factors that have a strong impact on the performance of MAC protocols. To achieve this goal, we investigated different MAC protocols and studied the impact of non-environmental factors that may degrade performance. We simulated different MAC protocol approaches based on available underwater commercial modems to find the most efficient MAC protocol approach for monitoring the oil/gas industry based on core performance metrics. This research also shows the impact of using different commercial modems in terms of end-to-end delay, energy consumption, PDR, and total number of collisions. While existing MAC protocols have addressed the network performance of UWSNs, different types of protocols are vulnerable to several types of attacks. Specifically, secure MAC protocols must be developed to prevent and mitigate the impact of Sybil, Blackhole, Wormhole, Hello Flooding, Acknowledgment Spoofing, Selective Forwarding, Sinkhole, and Resource Exhaustion attacks. Therefore, we propose a lightweight multi-factor authentication mechanism that is dependent on zero-knowledge proof to prevent or mitigate malicious activities and secure UWSNs from these different types of attacks.