An improved key management scheme for heterogeneity wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The growing popularity of wireless sensor networks has brought increasing attention to many security issues for such networks. In these security issues, key management is one of the most challenging and in dire need of solving problems. A lot of research has been mainly concentrated on key management for homogeneous wireless sensor networks. However, such homogeneous networks could restrict them to have a long network lifetime as well as to improve network connectivity. Recent research has shown that heterogeneous wireless sensor networks have greater performance and reliability. In this paper, we propose a key management scheme for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks to improve the random key pre-distribution scheme using deployment knowledge of nodes and the prior area deployment information. The performance evaluation and security analysis show that our scheme can substantially improve the network connectivity with low complexity and significant reduction on storage requirement, and enhance the network resilience against node capture, compared with existing key management schemes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.