A Multi-Round Game-Based Source Location Privacy Protection Scheme With AUV Enabled in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

With a growing demand for the development of smart ocean projects, the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) integrating multiple networks will gradually become the mainstream, particularly for civil, commercial, and military scenarios. During development, however, the security aspect cannot be ignored. Faced with possible future battles on the ocean, this study focuses on underwater source location privacy protection for both static and mobile sources. By combining the Ekman drift model, location privacy protection is converted into multi-round gaming between the source and adversary, in which two ways of gaming on nodes, autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), and adversary are adopted to protect the static source location. Because the location of the mobile source, such as underwater intelligent agent, changes regularly, the protection for this type of source is focused on the trajectory, preventing the mobile source from being tracked. This paper aims to protect the location privacy of the static source first and then initial attempts to protect the dynamic source location privacy. By fuzzing the remaining semantic information after the mobile source passes by, the trajectory of the mobile source is protected, thereby protecting its location privacy. Compared with existing algorithms, the simulation results of the proposed scheme indicate the probability that the source has been captured. Furthermore, the results show that the period of safety of the proposed algorithm is longer than that of a multi-hop-based location privacy protection scheme but shorter than that of an autonomous underwater vehicle based scheme. Although the difference in the energy consumption of the nodes among the compared schemes is little increased, the delay varies significantly.

Automated summary

With the increasing demand for smart ocean projects, the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) integrating multiple networks is becoming mainstream, especially in civil, commercial, and military scenarios. This study focuses on protecting the location privacy of both static and mobile underwater sources. By using the Ekman drift model, a multi-round gaming approach is adopted to protect the static source location, and trajectory protection is implemented to prevent tracking of the mobile source. The simulation results of the proposed scheme show the probability of source capture and demonstrate its longer safety period compared to other schemes.