Post-Deployment Key Management in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks
Abstract
Many wireless sensor network applications require secure communication between nodes
in the network. However, establishing pair-wise keys between nodes to provide security is
challenging due to the limited resources in sensor nodes and the hostile environments in
which they are deployed. Many key establishment schemes have been previously proposed
for wireless sensor networks. However, most of these schemes were designed to work in a
homogeneous network environment in which the nodes all have similar capabilities. Our
work establishes that better performance can be achieved in a heterogeneous sensor
network environment. We present a key management scheme for establishing pair-wise
keys after deployment in a heterogeneous wireless sensor network. We take advantage of
the more powerful nodes present in a heterogeneous network to reduce the communication
overhead and ultimately the power consumption necessary to perform these services to the
network. Additionally, by taking advantage of these nodes we are able to increase the
overall network connectivity and resiliency against node capture attacks.