Abstract
Conventional underwater technologies were not able to provide authentication and proper visualization of unexplored ocean areas to accommodate a wide range of applications. The aforesaid technologies face several challenges including decentralization, beacon node localization (for identification of nodes), authentication of Internet of Underwater Things (IoUTs) objects and unreliable beacon node communication between purpose oriented IoT-enabled networks. Recently, new technologies such as blockchain (BC) and the IoUTs have been used to reduce the issues but there are still some research gaps; for example, unreliable beacon messages for node acquisition have significant impacts on node identification and localization and many constrained node resources, etc. Further, the uncertainty of acoustic communication and the environment itself become problems when designing a trust-based framework for the IoUTs. In this research, a trust-based hybrid BC-enabled beacon node localization (THBNL) framework is proposed to employ a secure strategy for beacon node localization (BNL) to mine the underwater localized nodes via the hybrid blockchain enabled beacon node localization ((HBNL)-N-2) algorithm. This framework helps to merge two disciplines; it is hybrid because it follows the nature and bio inspired meta heuristics algorithms for scheduling the beacon nodes. The performance of the proposed approach is also evaluated for different factors such as node losses, packet delivery ratios, residual and energy consumption and waiting time analysis, etc. These findings show that the work done so far has been successful in achieving the required goals while remaining within the system parameters.