Enhanced Tame-Based Key Predistribution Scheme for Sensor Networks

Abstract

The pairwise key establishment in sensor networks is a fundamental and challenge task because public key cryptography and key distribution center (KDC) are not desirable to use on strictly resource-limited sensor nodes. In order to improve the performance, some of the existing key management schemes proposed to utilize the location information of sensor nodes to do the key distribution. However, in some applications, the location information of sensor nodes may not be available. In this paper, we first take advantage of heterogeneous sensor nodes to enhance the tame-based key predistribution scheme. The analysis and simulation demonstrate that the enhanced scheme not only provides deterministic authentication service, but also has better performance in terms of the initialization time, memory overhead, communication overhead, probability to establish a pairwise key between two neighboring nodes, and resilience against node compromises. We then extend the enhanced scheme to a cluster-based key predistribution scheme. The analysis and experiment indicate that in addition to preserving the advantages of the enhanced scheme, the cluster-based scheme has more efficient key predistribution process, much less energy consumption for the pairwise key establishment, and perfect resilience against node compromises. Finally, we apply the clusterbased scheme in mobile sensor networks to support the pairwise key establishment between mobile sensor nodes.