Supporting secure communication and data collection in mobile sensor networks

Abstract

Sensor deployments may be static, but researchers have recently been making a case for mobile collector nodes to enhance data acquisition. Since mobile nodes are often more privileged, their compromise can give the adversary a significant advantage. Hence, security mechanisms for such networks must tolerate mobile node compromises. Unlike static sensors, which communicate mostly with their neighbors, mobile nodes may communicate with nodes all over the network. Hence, key establishment is a much harder challenge with mobile nodes. We first analyze the impact of mobile collector compromises on the reliability of data received by the base station, and the circumstances under which reliability can be guaranteed. Second, we present mGKE, a key predistribution scheme for very general group-based sensor deployments. mGKE allows any pair of neighboring sensors to establish a unique pairwise key, regardless of sensor density or distribution. It is also usable by mobile collectors. Our analysis and evaluation show the superiority of mGKE over current methods in terms of resilience, connectivity, communication overhead, and memory requirements. © 2006 IEEE.