A key management scheme for cross-layering designs in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The current wireless sensor network designs are largely based on a layered approach. The suboptimality and inflexibility of this paradigm result in poor performance, due to constraints of power, communication, and computational capabilities. Key management plays an important role in wireless sensor networks, because it not only takes charge of securing link-layer communications between nodes, but also has great effects on other protocol layers, e.g. routing and IDS (Intrusion Detection System). However, no existing key management protocols have attached enough importance to cross-layering designs. In this paper, we propose a cross-layering key management scheme, which can provide other protocol layers with a nice trust-level metric. The trust-level metric is generated during the pairwise key establishment phase, and it varies as system conditions change. This metric describes the security level between two neighboring nodes and helps other protocol layers to make decisions. We also present simulations and analysis to show the superior characteristics of our scheme against both passive attacks and active attacks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.