Source routing based pairwise key establishment protocol for sensor networks

Sensor networks are composed of a large number of low power sensor devices. For secure communication among sensors, secret keys must be established between them. The establishment of secret keys after deployment of sensors requires wireless communication. Because of the energy constraints, an efficient key establishment scheme cannot be designed without considering the power consumption factor in wireless communication. In order to reduce the communication overhead, we propose a source routing based pairwise key establishment protocol for large-scale sensor networks. We then use a probability model proposed in [D. Huang et al., (2004)] to analyze the communication overhead, and security strength of the scheme.