A Traffic-Aware Key Management (TKM) Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, most of the existing key management schemes, establish shared keys for all pairs of neighbor sensors without considering the communication between these nodes. This results in causing huge overhead. For large scale WSNs, these schemes still need each sensor to be loaded with a bulky amount of keys. In many-to-one traffic pattern of sensor networks, large numbers of sensor nodes send data to single or few base stations. Thus a sensor node may communicate with a small set of neighbors. Based on this fact, in this paper, a novel traffic-aware key management (TKM) scheme is developed for WSNs, which only establishes shared keys for active sensors which participate in direct communication, based on the topology information of the network. Numerical results show that proposed key management scheme achieves high connectivity. Simulation results show that proposed key management scheme achieves stronger resilience against node capture and low energy consumption.