Agent-based secure routing for underwater acoustic sensor networks

The underwater networks have severe security implications and are vulnerable to various types of attacks such as selective forwarding, wormhole, and sinkhole. Neighbor discovery, a fundamental requirement for routing is vulnerable to wormhole attack, which enables false neighbor acceptance, thereby degrading the routing performance. The proposed agent-based secured routing scheme enhances the quality of service by discovering the wormhole resilient secure neighbors and route the information through the secure path. This scheme uses 4 agencies, namely, security, routing, underwater gateway, and vehicle, which are embedded with static and mobile agents. (1) Agents in security agency of a node discover secured neighbors by using the direction of arrival estimation and authentication, (2) agents in routing agency of a node establish secured routes from source to surface gateway, (3) agents in Underwater Gateway Agency communicate with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and underwater nodes for key distribution, and (4) vehicle traversing agency in AUV coordinates with Underwater Gateway Agency for changing AUVs traversal to cover the isolated network area. The proposed scheme depicts the improved performance compared to basic neighbor discovery and channel aware routing protocol in terms of failure detection, energy consumption, and overheads.