A routing-driven key management scheme for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks based on deployment knowledge

Key establishment in wireless sensor networks is a challenging problem for the constrained energy, memory, and computational capabilities of the sensor nodes. Most existing key management schemes try to establish pairwise keys for each pair of neighbor sensors, whether these nodes communicate with each other or not, and this causes large overhead. In this paper, focusing on the management of encryption keys in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks(HWSN), We propose a routing-driven distributed key management scheme based on deployment knowledge (RDDKM), which only establishes shared keys for neighbor sensors that communicate with each other. In RDDKM, the sensor nodes are divided into some group, intra-group pairwise keys are setup only between the nodes which need to communicate with each other, and inter-group pairwise keys are established between cluster head sensors. We describe the details of our algorithm and compare it with other proposed schemes. Comparison and theory analysis show that the proposed scheme outperforms most of the existing key establishment schemes in terms of wireless sensor networks security, key connectivity and communication cost.