A cooperative security monitoring mechanism aided by optimal multiple slave cluster heads for UASNs

As each cluster head (CH) sensor node is used to aggregate, fuse, and forward data from different sensor nodes in an underwater acoustic sensor network (UASN), guaranteeing the data security in a CH is very critical. In this paper, a cooperative security monitoring mechanism aided by multiple slave cluster heads (SCHs) is proposed to keep track of the data security of a CH. By designing a low complexity "equilateral triangle algorithm (ETA)", the optimal SCHs (named as ETA-based multiple SCHs) are selected from the candidate SCHs so as to improve the dispersion and coverage of SCHs and achieve large-scale data security monitoring. In addition, by analyzing the entire monitoring process, the close form expression of the probability of the failure attack identification for the SCHs with respect to the probability of attack launched by ordinary nodes is deduced. The simulation results show that the proposed optimal ETA-based multiple SCH cooperation scheme has lower probability of the failure attack identification than that of the existing schemes. In addition, the numerical simulation results are consistent with the theoretical analysis results, thus verifying the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.