An Attack-Resistant Trust Model Based on Multidimensional Trust Metrics in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have been widely used in many applications where a variable number of sensor nodes collaborate with each other to perform monitoring tasks. A trust model plays an important role in realizing collaborations of sensor nodes. Although many trust models have been proposed for terrestrial wireless sensor networks (TWSNs) in recent years, it is not feasible to directly use these trust models in UASNs due to unreliable underwater communication channel and mobile network environment. To achieve accurate and energy efficient trust evaluation in UASNs, an attack-resistant trust model based on multidimensional trust metrics (ARTMM) is proposed in this paper. The ARTMM mainly consists of three types of trust metrics, which are link trust, data trust, and node trust. During the process of trust calculation, unreliability of communication channel and mobility of underwater environment are carefully analyzed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed trust model is quite suitable for mobile underwater environment. In addition, the performance of the ARTMM is clearly better than that of conventional trust models in terms of both evaluation accuracy and energy consumption.