Mobile device based dynamic key management protocols for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In recent years, wireless sensor network (WSN) applications have tended to transmit data hop by hop, from sensor nodes through cluster nodes to the base station. As a result, users must collect data from the base station. This study considers two different applications: hop by hop transmission of data from cluster nodes to the base station and the direct access to cluster nodes data by mobile users via mobile devices. Due to the hardware limitations of WSNs, some low-cost operations such as symmetric cryptographic algorithms and hash functions are used to implement a dynamic key management. The session key can be updated to prevent threats of attack from each communication. With these methods, the data gathered in wireless sensor networks can be more securely communicated. Moreover, the proposed scheme is analyzed and compared with related schemes. In addition, an NS2 simulation is developed in which the experimental results show that the designed communication protocol is workable.