A Highly Scalable Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Given the sensitivity of the potential WSN applications and because of resource limitations, key management emerges as a challenging issue for WSNs. One of the main concerns when designing a key management scheme is the network scalability. Indeed, the protocol should support a large number of nodes to enable a large scale deployment of the network. In this paper, we propose a new highly scalable key management scheme for WSNs which provides a good secure connectivity coverage. For this purpose, we make use for the first time of the unital design theory. We show that the basic mapping from unitals to key pre-distribution allows to achieve an extremely high network scalability. Nonetheless, this naive mapping does not guarantee a high key sharing probability. Therefore, we propose an enhanced unital-based key pre-distribution scheme providing high network scalability and good key sharing probability lower bounded by 1 − e −1 ≈ 0.632. We conduct analytical analysis and simulations to compare our solution to main existing ones regarding different criteria including storage overhead, network scalability, network connectivity, average secure path length and network resiliency. The obtained results show that our approach enhances considerably the network scalability while providing high secure connectivity coverage and good overall performances. Moreover, the obtained results show that at equal network size, our solution reduces significantly the storage overhead compared to main existing solutions.

Efficient Key Management Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks: An Overview

“…W.Bechkit et al [10], states that Key management emerges a challenging issue in wireless sensor networks due to the sensitivity of the potential wireless sensor network and the resource limitations. The main issue to be considered is scalability, when designing a key management scheme.…”

TKP: Three level key pre-distribution with mobile sinks for wireless sensor networks

“…Nonetheless, this naive mapping does not guarantee a high key sharing probability. Walid Bechkit et al, [11] propose an enhanced unital-based key pre-distribution scheme providing high network scalability and good key sharing probability.…”

A Scalable Key Scheme for Multi-Dimension Wireless Sensor Networks

“…By a logical extension of the ideas of the paper [4] and [5], the base station generates M key groups and each key has its identifier in this scheme. The first key group consists of …”

“…This scheme divides sensing multi-dimension hypercube into the same dimension small hypercubes called cells, 2 d n cells of which consist of a d n -dimension cluster called logical group and uses the unital-based scheme to generate keys. Each pair of sensors can set up their shared keys directly or indirectly and then can communicate securely through utilizing the ideas of paper [4] and [5]. Analysis and comparison show that this scheme enhances the resilience of WSNs, and has good network connectivity.…”

“…In paper [4], the unital design is a Steiner 2-design and it contains Every pair of points is exactly included in one block simultaneously. Through employing the idea in the [4], Walid Bechkit et al [5] gave a key management strategy to guarantee a safe coverage for large WSNs.…”