A Cluster based Key Management Scheme for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) explore aquatic environment to facilitate various underwater surveillance applications. However, UWSN unique features also impose new challenges such as limited bandwidth, huge propagation delay, mobile nature of nodes and high error rates. UWSNs deployment in unattended environment further exacerbates their vulnerabilities to the attacks. These challenges make security solutions proposed for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) impractical to be applicable for UWSN. This paper analyzes the problem of security and mobility in UWSN and proposes Cluster based Key management Protocol (CKP), a new key management protocol for hierarchical networks where sensor nodes form cluster around more capable nodes. CKP also proposes a new communication architecture that handles mobility efficiently and minimizes the impact of a node compromisation to itself. CKP provides confidentiality, authentication, integrity and freshness. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the CKP is energy and storage-efficient. Further, we investigate the survivability and the security of the CKP against various security threats in order to evaluate its effectiveness.