Anonymous cluster-based Source Location Protection in Underwater Pipeline Monitoring Operations

Submarine pipelines are among the most important methods of marine oil transportation, and they are widely used in offshore oil exploitation. They can be efficiently monitored by deploying sensor nodes conforming underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs), located near to oil well, so that these nodes can sense, broadcast, and receive data surveying the status of the submarine infrastructure timely manner. Inevitably, UASNs may experience security problems, owing to the open nature of the underwater environment. This paper proposes a new source location privacy protection scheme based on an offshore oil acquisition platform, to address these security issues, particularly the case of source location protection. In the proposed scheme, nodes are defined as pipeline and environment locations, and are allocated to different clusters. The concept of forming anonymous cluster by exchanging the identities of a source and a cluster head is introduced to select fake sources. In addition, a data fragmentation method is developed to reduce the energy consumption of fake packets transmission. Particularly, we propose the deployment of disguised AUVs to collect data from fake sources, to conceal and protect the location of the actual sources. Simulation results show that the safety time of the network is increased by about 6%. Due to the adoption of the data fragmentation method, the energy consumption of nodes is also decreased.