A Location-Aware Scheme for Key Establishment in Wireless Sensor Networks

Key establishment in sensor networks is a challenging problem since asymmetric cryptosystems are unsuitable for use in resource constrained sensor nodes, and also because the nodes are vulnerable to physical capture. The key establishment schemes proposed recently in the literature are known to yield higher connectivity and better resilience against node captures if some prior knowledge of deployment locations of the nodes are available. In this paper, a location-aware key predistribution scheme, called the t-neighborhood scheme, is proposed, which provides unconditional security and works for any deployment topology. Our scheme provides better trade-off among connectivity, security and generality compared to the schemes published so far, and can be adapted to support addition of nodes after the initial deployment