An Energy-Aware Random Pairwise Keys Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, nodes are easy to be compromised by the adversary due to the resource limitations of the sensor nodes. How to reduce the energy consumption of nodes and increase the security becomes the goal of the security technologies. An Energy-aware Random Pairwise Keys (ERPK) scheme was proposed in this paper. In the phase of the key-setup, the node identity and the residual energy were stored, and the pairwise keys were generated after the node identity was matched up with the neighbor nodes, the pairwise keys between the node and the neighbor nodes were validated according to the identity and residual energy, then analyzed the security of the ERPK scheme with the multi-hop communication. The performances of the ERPK scheme such as the energy consumption, the lifetime of network and the security were analyzed and simulated. The results show that the ERPK scheme has lower energy consumption and longer network lifetime than those of the random pairwise keys scheme, and also the compromised probability of the nodes is reduced.