Key management is the basic building block of all the security protocols and is one of the most challenging issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Centralising a trusted key management server is not an appropriate solution in such fully distributed networks. On the other hand, designing a distributed key management system is a challenging task, due to the constrained characteristics of sensor nodes, which are limited in storage, computation, communication, and energy. In the literature, there is a hot research effort on key management purpose for WSNs. The greatest part of the existing solutions focuses mainly on the optimisation of the key number, rekeying frequency and process or the encryption system of the distributed keys. Unfortunately, these systems are implemented as an additional and independent service, involving a considerable overhead. In this study, the authors propose µKMS (micro key management system) for WSNs. µKMS implements a dissimulation scheme, embedding the rekeying process messages on the unexploited coding space of the exchanged ZigBee packets. They have developed simulations, where the obtained results show the relevance of µKMS in terms of communication overhead, storage overhead, and energy consumption.

Mobile Wireless Sensor Network (MWSN) is a set of interconnected mobile sensor devices forming a dynamic network without a fixed administration. MWSN is used in various domains, such as disaster detection, medical systems, military applications, vehicular communications, and in other sensitive applications. Compared to the classical sensor networks, MWSNs involve an additional constraint consisting of the topology change frequency caused by the mobility of sensor devices. This influences highly the energy consumption and consequently the network reliability. In this paper, we take in charge this important issue and we contribute by the proposition of an efficient and energy-aware routing protocol. The proposed protocol operates for both request and event oriented MWSN applications. It introduces the sensor device mobility history in order to build-up stable routing paths, and incorporates a novel technique of dissimulation in order to exchange the mobility control messages without overhead. We have evaluated the performances of the proposed protocol through simulations, in which it provides effective results in terms of energy consumption and load-balancing.

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