A flexible and lightweight signcryption scheme for underwater wireless sensor networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) are a new research area gaining popularity. It has several key applications for instance; marine monitoring, surveillance, environmental sensing, etc. However, It has several challenges including security, node mobility, limited bandwidth, and high error rates. Thus, to solve these issues, herein we propose a new lightweight Signcryption scheme for UWSNs. The proposed scheme effectively balances computational complexity and enhances the security of UWSNS. In contrast to the other state-of-the-art cryptographic schemes, the proposed scheme consists of a single combined operation of encryption and signing processes, which significantly improves its computational and communicational performance to ensure confidence when transmitting data. We performed the experimentation, and the experimental results show that the proposed scheme performs well compared to the state-of-the-art model. In addition, the experimental results revealed that the proposed scheme had a 40% less computational cost, 30% less energy consumption, and 25% less communication overhead than the state-of-the-art methods. This makes the proposed scheme highly appropriate for resource-scarce UWSNs. The proposed scheme also showed good scalability, where the performance could be sustained from a small-scale network of 50 nodes to a bandwidth of 200 nodes. Further, the proposed model also kept the security and latency low for the mobile nodes in an environment with high node mobility over the underwater terrain. In addition, the proposed method ensures flexibility and scalability by offering compatibility with diverse network structures and seamless integration with various cryptographic approaches, making it adaptable for dynamic underwater environments and broader applications such as IoT and smart city networks.