Joint Energy and Security Optimization in Underwater Wireless Communication Networks

Underwater wireless communication networks (UWCNs) can support a wide range of applications in the underwater domain, including mining and drilling, coastline monitoring, border surveillance, and submarine/mine detection. Some of these applications are sensitive in nature (e.g., military) and demand stringent security requirements for data communications. In order to prevent malicious attacks (e.g., jamming) in these UWCNs, robust security countermeasures must be implemented. Additionally, sensitive data communications must be protected. However, computationally expensive security protocols, such as encryption, can severely shorten UWCN lifetime, where battery-powered nodes already suffer from scarce energy supplies. In this work, we exploit content caching as a countermeasure for jamming and utilize selective encryption of sensitive data to simultaneously maximize network security and node residual energy in UWCNs. Our work formulates the joint security and residual energy maximization challenge as an optimization problem in which results indicate that the proposed technique can guarantee secure communications without sacrificing network lifespan.