Pairwise key distribution scheme for two-tier sensor networks

Securing data in wireless sensor networks is very important because of hostile environment. And securing data is quite challenging as well because of limited resources the sensor nodes have. Many security schemes have been proposed for homogeneous sensor networks where all the sensor nodes hold similar capabilities. Recently researchers have shown that heterogeneous sensor networks can perform better than homogeneous sensor network. In this paper, we present a new post-deployment pairwise key distribution scheme for two-tier sensor networks. A special tree structure is used for generating the addresses for the nodes in the network. Polynomial based key generating model is used for generating pair-wise keys to be shared with neighbor nodes. The performance evaluation of our scheme shows that it has fewer security overheads, uses little memory to store the keys, and has smaller computation overhead, and is strongly resilient against the node capture attack, in comparison with other already existing important key management approaches.