A secure and energy balanced clustering protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

In Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs), cluster-based network architectures are widely used, which can balance energy consumption and prolong the lifetime of network. Hence, existing protocols amid at election of the optimal cluster head(CH), which are mainly based on residual energy or minimum energy consumption. Constrained by the particularities and the harsh working environment, UWSNs are vulnerable to many kinds of attacks. The malicious attacker or compromised node may be selected as CH by forging residual energy, and then capture packets and disrupt operation of networks. Trust management mechanisms can detect and remove malicious nodes by detecting and evaluating behaviors of nodes. In this article, an overview of existing trust management mechanisms and clustering protocols is given. To secure UWSNs, a trust-based secure and energy balanced clustering protocol is proposed to enhance the security of UWSNs.