A novel key redistribution scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Key management has long been a challenging problem in wireless Distributed Sensor Networks (DSNs) due to their high security requirements and strict resource constraints. Recently, a randomized key pre-distribution scheme has been introduced to serve as a practical solution and many improvements are subsequently proposed. These schemes mainly focus on key allocations based on pre-deployment estimates of post-deployment information items, such as location data and attack probabilities. Unfortunately, such information items may be unavailable or may change over time. Based on adaptability to post-deployment contexts, we propose a key redistribution scheme that exploits neighboring keys from connected neighbors to reach unconnected nodes. We show that our scheme can be integrated into most existing key predistribution schemes to further improve their performance. We demonstrate our proposed scheme's salient features, such as high connectivity, high resilience, and efficient memory usage, by both analytical and simulation results. ©2007 IEEE.