The transmission environment of underwater wireless sensor networks is open, and important transmission data can be easily intercepted, interfered with, and tampered with by malicious nodes. Malicious nodes can be mixed in the network and are difficult to distinguish, especially in time-varying underwater environments. To address this issue, this article proposes a GAN-based trusted routing algorithm (GTR). GTR defines the trust feature attributes and trust evaluation matrix of underwater network nodes, constructs the trust evaluation model based on a generative adversarial network (GAN), and achieves malicious node detection by establishing a trust feature profile of a trusted node, which improves the detection performance for malicious nodes in underwater networks under unlabeled and imbalanced training data conditions. GTR combines the trust evaluation algorithm with the adaptive routing algorithm based on Q-Learning to provide an optimal trusted data forwarding route for underwater network applications, improving the security, reliability, and efficiency of data forwarding in underwater networks. GTR relies on the trust feature profile of trusted nodes to distinguish malicious nodes and can adaptively select the forwarding route based on the status of trusted candidate next-hop nodes, which enables GTR to better cope with the changing underwater transmission environment and more accurately detect malicious nodes, especially unknown malicious node intrusions, compared to baseline algorithms. Simulation experiments showed that, compared to baseline algorithms, GTR can provide a better malicious node detection performance and data forwarding performance. Under the condition of 15% malicious nodes and 10% unknown malicious nodes mixed in, the detection rate of malicious nodes by the underwater network configured with GTR increased by 5.4%, the error detection rate decreased by 36.4%, the packet delivery rate increased by 11.0%, the energy tax decreased by 11.4%, and the network throughput increased by 20.4%.

The underwater wireless sensor network is an important component of the underwater three-dimensional monitoring system. Due to the high bit error rate, high delay, low bandwidth, limited energy, and high dynamic of underwater networks, it is very difficult to realize efficient and reliable data transmission. Therefore, this paper posits that it is not enough to design the routing algorithm only from the perspective of the transmission environment; the comprehensive design of the data transmission algorithm should also be combined with the application. An edge prediction-based adaptive data transmission algorithm (EP-ADTA) is proposed that can dynamically adapt to the needs of underwater monitoring applications and the changes in the transmission environment. EP-ADTA uses the end–edge–cloud architecture to define the underwater wireless sensor networks. The algorithm uses communication nodes as the agents, realizes the monitoring data prediction and compression according to the edge prediction, dynamically selects the transmission route, and controls the data transmission accuracy based on reinforcement learning. The simulation results show that EP-ADTA can meet the accuracy requirements of underwater monitoring applications, dynamically adapt to the changes in the transmission environment, and ensure efficient and reliable data transmission in underwater wireless sensor networks.