Research Article
A Cluster-Based Secure Synchronization Protocol for
Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks
Ming Xu,
1,2
Guangzhong Liu,
1
Daqi Zhu,
1
and Huafeng Wu
3
1
College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, 1550 Haigang Avenue, Shanghai 201306, China
2
Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, 220 Handan Road, Shanghai 200433, China
3
Merchant Marine College, Shanghai Maritime University, 1550 Haigang Avenue, Shanghai 201306, China
Correspondence should be addressed to Ming Xu; mingxu@shmtu.edu.cn
Received October ; Revised February ; Accepted March ; Published April
Academic Editor: Marimuthu Palaniswami
Copyright © Ming Xu et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Secure time synchronization is one of the key concerns for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs). is paper presents
a CLUster-based Secure Synchronization (CLUSS) protocol that ensures the security of synchronization under harsh underwater
environments against various attacks, including Sybil attack, replay attack, message manipulation attack, and delay attack. e
time synchronization process of CLUSS is divided into three phases: authentication phase, intercluster synchronization phase,
and intracluster synchronization phase. During the authentication phase, cluster heads are authenticated to beacons and ordinary
nodes are authenticated to cluster heads. During the process of intercluster and intracluster synchronization phases, CLUSS
distinguishes the propagation delay of downlink from that of uplink caused by node movement in order to improve time
synchronization accuracy. Moreover, part of these two phases can be executed concurrently for reducing the number of messages
generated in synchronization. We demonstrate through simulations that CLUSS can reduce synchronization errors as well as energy
consumption compared to traditional protocols in various circumstances.
1. Introduction
Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have a lot
of potential application areas such as oceanographic data col-
lection, disaster prevention, pollution monitoring, oshore
exploration, and military surveillance [–]. UWSN is a new
area of wireless sensor network in underwater environments
which has challenges to be overcome such as long propa-
gation delay, severely limited bandwidth, and unpredictable
node movement [–]. All the above distinct features of
UWSNs give birth to new challenging areas for every level
of the network protocol suite. Among them, providing clock
synchronization is a well-known fundamental issue due to
theuniquecharacteristicsofUWSNs[, ]. A number of
important network functionalities require that nodes have
a common notion of time, including time stamping of
events, distributed data aggregation, MAC, and localization.
Meanwhile, numerous time synchronization protocols have
been proposed for terrestrial wireless sensor networks, such
as RBS [], TPSN [], and FSTP []. However, they cannot
be directly applied to UWSNs, because most of them assume
negligible propagation delay among sensor nodes, which is
nottrueinUWSNs.Ontheotherhand,asUWSNsareoen
deployed in an inaccessible and hostile environment, those
unattended sensor nodes are likely to incur many critical
security attacks, including Sybil attack, replay attack, message
manipulation attack, and delay attack [, ]. erefore, time
synchronization must resist modication attempts by attack-
ers, especially in applications such as military surveillance
and oceanographic data collection.
Time synchronization attacks have great eects on a set of
sensor network applications and services since they heavily
rely on accurate time synchronization to perform their
respective functions. All attacks on time synchronization
protocols of UWSNs aim to deceive some nodes that their
neighbor’s clocks are at a dierent time than they actually are.
In Sybil attack, a malicious node pretends to have multiple
identities. In some cases, an attacker can simply create
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Volume 2014, Article ID 398610, 13 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/398610
剩余12页未读，继续阅读
资源评论
