Journal of Communication Engineering

Journal of Communication Engineering

A Key Management Scheme for Secure Communication in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Document Type : Research Paper

Author
M. Anzani
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Science and Technology of Mazandaran, Behshahr, Iran
10.22070/jce.2026.20725.1286
Abstract
Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) explore the aquatic environment to facilitate various underwater surveillance applications. Since UWSNs are deployed in hostile environments, ensuring secure communication between the sensor nodes is important. This underscores the need for an efficient and secure key distribution scheme to allow sensor nodes to establish secure communication channels. Existing secure key distribution schemes designed for hierarchical networks may be deployable in UWSNs, but they suffer from high computational and communication overheads and thus consume significant memory. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical key pre-distribution scheme based on "Residual Design" for UWSNs. Our proposed approach is a highly scalable key management scheme which provides good secure connectivity. The proposed key distribution scheme is designed to minimize storage overhead while increasing the resistance of the network against node capture attacks. The performance and security properties of the proposed scheme demonstrate that in an equal-size network, our scheme reduces node storage overhead significantly and provides high connectivity and resilience.
Keywords
Underwater wireless sensor networks
Key management
hierarchical networks
Security
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