A NOVEL EFFICIENT ACCESS CONTROL SCHEME FOR LARGE-SCALE DISTRIBUTED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Abstract

In a wireless sensor network, we often require the deployment of new nodes to extend the lifetime of the network because some sensor nodes may be lost due to power exhaustion problem or they may be also malicious nodes. In order to protect malicious nodes from joining the sensor network, access control mechanism becomes a major challenging problem in the design of sensor network protocols. Existing access control protocols designed for wireless sensor networks require either high communication overheads or they are not scalable due to involvement of the base station during authentication and key establishment processes. In this paper, we propose a new access control scheme for large-scale distributed wireless sensor networks, which not only identifies the identity of each node but it has also ability to differentiate between old nodes and new nodes. The proposed scheme does not require involvement of the base station during authentication and key establishment processes, and it can be easily implemented as a dynamic access control protocol. In addition, our scheme significantly reduces communication costs in order to authenticate neighbor nodes among each other and establish symmetric keys between neighbor nodes as compared with existing approaches. Further, our scheme is secure against different attacks and unconditionally secure against node capture attacks. The simulation results of our scheme using the AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool ensure that our scheme is safe.