A Traffic-Aware Trust Model Based on Edge Computing for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

The burgeoning deployment of Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) for maritime applications highlights the critical need for reliable trust models to defend against internal security threats. Existing trust models are often inadequate due to high packet error rates inherent in underwater communication and a lack of accounting for nodes' traffic behavior. Additionally, conventional UASN architectures suffer from significant latency in gathering and processing trust evidence, which delays the identification of adversarial nodes. Addressing these limitations, this paper proposes the Traffic-Aware and Edge Computing-Enabled Trust Model (TECTM), a solution expressly conceived for UASNs. TECTM integrates environmental models to assess the acoustic environment's impact on communication and employs network traffic analysis as a trustworthy metric for identifying attack patterns. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) serve as edge computing nodes, leveraging a machine learning algorithm to enhance trust assessments within node clusters. Moreover, TECTM introduces a refined trust update mechanism, designed to be responsive to the dynamic underwater environment and complex attack behaviors. Through comparative simulations, TECTM demonstrates enhanced accuracy in the detection of malicious nodes, outperforming other methods.