Secure Cooperation of Autonomous Mobile Sensors Using an Underwater Acoustic Network

Sensors

Andrea Caiti¹  Vincenzo Calabrò¹  Gianluca Dini²  Angelica Lo Duca² 

[1] Department of Energy and Systems Engineering, Inter-University Center on Integrated System for the Marine Environment, Interdepartmental Research Center ”E.Piaggio”, University of Pisa, Largo L. Lazzarino, 1, Pisa 56126, Italy; E-Mails:;Department of Information Engineering, Inter-university center on Integrated System for the Marine Environment, Interdepartmental Research Center ”E.Piaggio”, University of Pisa, Largo L. Lazzarino, 1, Pisa 56126, Italy; E-Mails:

关键词: Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs);    acoustic communication;    network security;    security and trust;    adaptive systems;    sensor networks;    cooperative systems;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s120201967

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Methodologies and algorithms are presented for the secure cooperation of a team of autonomous mobile underwater sensors, connected through an acoustic communication network, within surveillance and patrolling applications. In particular, the work proposes a cooperative algorithm in which the mobile underwater sensors (installed on Autonomous Underwater Vehicles—AUVs) respond to simple local rules based on the available information to perform the mission and maintain the communication link with the network (behavioral approach). The algorithm is intrinsically robust: with loss of communication among the vehicles the coverage performance (i.e., the mission goal) is degraded but not lost. The ensuing form of graceful degradation provides also a reactive measure against Denial of Service. The cooperative algorithm relies on the fact that the available information from the other sensors, though not necessarily complete, is trustworthy. To ensure trustworthiness, a security suite has been designed, specifically oriented to the underwater scenario, and in particular with the goal of reducing the communication overhead introduced by security in terms of number and size of messages. The paper gives implementation details on the integration between the security suite and the cooperative algorithm and provides statistics on the performance of the system as collected during the UAN project sea trial held in Trondheim, Norway, in May 2011.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2012 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland