Strengthening the Achilles’ Heel: An AUV-Aided Message Ferry Approach Against Dissemination Vulnerability in UASNs

Abstract

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have attracted considerable attention due to the increasing demands on the Internet of Underwater Things. The monitored underwater data are disseminated by anchored nodes in UASNs through multihop transmissions. In the military applications, some underwater spy robots are probably dispatched by the enemy to invade the UASNs, and these underwater spy robots seek to steal the data messages disseminated by anchored nodes. In this article, the autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are taken as the ferries for the data message dissemination of some vulnerable anchored nodes, so as to reduce the risk of data messages being stolen by the spy robots. To this end, an index dissemination vulnerability is first introduced to measure the risk of data messages being stolen around anchored nodes, and the network topology is specially investigated to ameliorate the dissemination vulnerabilities of anchored nodes. An AUV-aided message ferry approach (AMFA) is proposed for the UASNs invaded by underwater spy robots. In AMFA, the anchored nodes set the initial communication ranges according to a power law distribution, and then, the communication ranges of anchored nodes are updated to achieve the required topology connectivity. Especially, some AUVs are assigned to ferry the data messages of the anchored nodes with the largest dissemination vulnerabilities. The simulation results demonstrate the preferable performance of AMFA, i.e., AMFA ameliorates the dissemination vulnerabilities of anchored nodes considerably while the required topology connectivity can be guaranteed.