A hierarchical identity-based signcryption scheme in underwater wireless sensor network

Abstract

The sensors in UWSN are vulnerable to malicious attack due to the transmission nature of wireless media under the water. Secure message delivery with low energy consumption is one of major aims in UWSN. In this paper, a Hierarchical Identity-based Signcryption (HIS) scheme is proposed for UWSN. Signcryption mechanism, which completes the signature and encryption in a single logical step, is adopted in the HIS scheme to decrease the communication and computation cost. The private keys of nodes are generated based on the node’s identity to decrease the communication cost. Two-layer architecture, cluster head layer and intra-cluster layer, is employed in the HIS scheme. Taking the difference on capacity between the cluster heads and ordinary nodes into account, we perform encrypting operations with different computation complexity in the two layers. The simulation results show that the HIS scheme outperforms ECC-CA, GLKM and AVM algorithm on energy consumption and time cost.