100% Connectivity for location aware code based KPD in clustered WSN: Merging blocks

Abstract

Key management in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a challenging task because of the stringent resource available to the nodes. As such key predistribution (KPD) is regarded as one of the best option for key management in WSN. This work analyzes an existing work by Simonova et al. that makes use of deployment knowledge where the deployment zone consists of clusters of nodes. Transversal design (TD) based KPD scheme of Lee and Stinson is used to distribute the keys in these clusters. However Simonova et al. points out that any KPD could have been used. This leads the current authors to investigates the applicability of Ruj and Roy's Reed Solomon (RS) code based KPD , similar to the TD based KPD in distributing the key in each cluster. Much like the TD based KPD, the RS code based KPD does not offer full connectivity among nodes in the clusters amounting to lack of full connectivity in the amalgamated network. Full connectivity among nodes in each cluster and thus the entire network can be achieved by a deterministically merging strategy using exactly two nodes. This merging strategy is certainly better than a random approach by Chakrabarti et al. where the exact number of nodes being merged is not specified and does not ensure full connectivity. Since the scheme of Simonova et al. uses too many keys after amalgamation, a modified approach using Cluster Head (CH) is proposed to provide full communication in the network. Comparative study establishes the proposed Cluster Head design perform better than the KPD of Simonova et al. while proving the efficiency of the merging strategy. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.