A Multi-Channel Interference Based Source Location Privacy Protection Scheme in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) gradually becomes the future direction of ocean. Many devices, which are called the sources, are deployed in the sea to fulfill scientific, civilian, and military needs. If the locations of these sources are leaked, it will cause a serious economic and military crisis. Thus, in this context, the source location privacy protection becomes critical. In this paper, we focus on the source location privacy protection of underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs), where a multi-channel interference based source location privacy protection scheme (MCISLP) is proposed. The MCISLP mainly contains four steps. First, to enhance the sense of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) for nodes, a noise reduction method is proposed. Then, based on the previous step, an AUV movement prediction method for nodes is presented to ensure the success of packet transmission. After that, for the information exchange among nodes, given the interference of multiple underwater channels, this interference is then utilized to protect the source location privacy. Further, to reduce the channel interference on the source packet, the time slot control is added to weaken the influence. Last, the ant colony algorithm is adopted for the data collection of AUV. The simulation results show that the MCISLP can increase the network safety time by up to 57 $\%$ (compared with data collection algorithms), and balance the energy consumption of nodes (for about 20 $\%$ energy saving), with a minor compromise of energy consumption of AUV and delay.