In this paper, we investigate the mobile node localization problem in an underwater positioning system using multiple surface beacons, where time synchronization between the surface beacons and underwater mobile nodes is not required. First, we propose a Time-Difference-of-Arrival-based (TDoA-based) node localization method. In the proposed method, as the underwater node receives the positioning messages from more than or equal to three surface beacons belonging to the same grid at one epoch, it calculates the location by itself using the information of received positioning messages and the corresponding arrival times. To deal with the problem that the number of received positioning messages at one epoch by the underwater node is not enough for the location calculation, we present the modified TDoA- based node localization method with buffered messages and the modified TDoA-based node localization method with motion information. The effectiveness of proposed TDoA-based node localization method and two modified methods is validated by simulation results and sea experiment data analytical results. The robustness of the TDoA-based node localization method is improved by two modified methods. Moreover, using the proposed TDoA-based node localization method and two modified methods, the underwater node can localize itself in low energy consumption and passive mode.

A distributed networked underwater sensor (DNUS) system can provide ocean measurements over a wide area with a large number of sensors. This paper studies the estimation of the ocean current field observed by a DNUS system. Considering that the current field is correlated in time and space, we present a statistically-based acoustic travel time difference tomography method based on a Kalman filter (KF) to reconstruct and track the ocean current field. A spatiotemporal autoregressive (AR) model is used to describe the time evolution of the current field. In the spatiotemporal AR model, the observation region is divided into subtriangle grids. The subtriangles are partitioned into clusters and each cluster is assigned with one AR coefficient. Moreover, the AR coefficients are updated adaptively with the past estimated current velocities. The proposed method is verified with the synthetic observational data generated by a barotropic ocean model. Compared with the regular distributed processing method, the proposed ocean current field reconstruction and tracking method achieves a lower region-integrated root-mean-square error (RMSE). In addition, by making use of the spatiotemporal correlation, the proposed method is robust to the measurement link failure and burst errors in the DNUS system.

The feature of non-infrastructure support in a wireless ad hoc network (WANET) makes it suffer from various attacks. Moreover, user authentication is the first safety barrier in a network. A mutual trust is achieved by a protocol which enables communicating parties to authenticate each other at the same time and to exchange session keys. For the resource-constrained WANET, an efficient and lightweight user authentication scheme is necessary. In this paper, we propose a user authentication scheme based on the self-certified public key system and elliptic curves cryptography for a WANET. Using the proposed scheme, an efficient two-way user authentication and secure session key agreement can be achieved. Security analysis shows that our proposed scheme is resilient to common known attacks. In addition, the performance analysis shows that our proposed scheme performs similar or better compared with some existing user authentication schemes.

During the procedure, a location-based service (LBS) query, the real location provided by the vehicle user may results in the disclosure of vehicle location privacy. Moreover, the point of interest retrieval service requires high accuracy of location information. However, some privacy preservation methods based on anonymity or obfuscation will affect the service quality. Hence, we study the location privacy-preserving method based on dummy locations in this paper. We propose a vehicle location privacy-preservation method based on dummy locations under road restriction in Internet of vehicles (IoV). In order to improve the validity of selected dummy locations under road restriction, entropy is used to represent the degree of anonymity, and the effective distance is introduced to represent the characteristics of location distribution. We present a dummy location selection algorithm to maximize the anonymous entropy and the effective distance of candidate location set consisting of vehicle user’s location and dummy locations, which ensures the uncertainty and dispersion of selected dummy locations. The proposed location privacy-preservation method does not need a trustable third-party server, and it protects the location privacy of vehicles as well as guaranteeing the LBS quality. The performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed location privacy-preservation method can improve the validity of dummy locations and enhance the preservation of location privacy compared with other methods based on dummy locations.

Due to the characteristics of underwater acoustic channel, media access control (MAC) protocols designed for underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASNs) are quite different from those for terrestrial wireless sensor networks. Moreover, in a sink-oriented network with event information generation in a sensor field and message forwarding to the sink hop-by-hop, the sensors near the sink have to transmit more packets than those far from the sink, and then a funneling effect occurs, which leads to packet congestion, collisions and losses, especially in UWASNs with long propagation delays. An improved CDMA-based MAC protocol, named path-oriented code assignment (POCA) CDMA MAC (POCA-CDMA-MAC), is proposed for UWASNs in this paper. In the proposed MAC protocol, both the round-robin method and CDMA technology are adopted to make the sink receive packets from multiple paths simultaneously. Since the number of paths for information gathering is much less than that of nodes, the length of the spreading code used in the POCA-CDMA-MAC protocol is shorter greatly than that used in the CDMA-based protocols with transmitter-oriented code assignment (TOCA) or receiver-oriented code assignment (ROCA). Simulation results show that the proposed POCA-CDMA-MAC protocol achieves a higher network throughput and a lower end-to-end delay compared to other CDMA-based MAC protocols.