A Key Management Scheme Using Deployment Knowledge for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks pose new security and privacy challenges. One of the important challenges is how to bootstrap secure communications among nodes. Several key management schemes have been proposed. However, they either cannot offer strong resilience against node capture attacks, or require too much memory for achieving the desired connectivity. In this paper, we propose a novel key management scheme using deployment knowledge. In our scheme, a target field is divided into a number of hexagon grids and sensor nodes are divided into the same number of groups as that of grids, where each group is deployed into a unique grid. By using deployment knowledge, we drastically reduce the number of potential groups from which a node's neighbors may come. Thus, a pairwise key can be generated efficiently for any two neighbor nodes. Compared with existing schemes, our scheme achieves higher connectivity with a much lower memory requirement and shorter transmission range. It also outperforms others in terms of resilience against node capture attacks.