ECPKS: An Improved Location-Aware Key Management Scheme in Static Sensor Networks

Abstract

A location-aware scheme uses a priori knowledge of the deployed sensor nodes of some target field in a sensor network. Such location-aware schemes improve substantially higher network connectivity and resilience against node captures if the deployment error between the actual and expected locations of the deployed sensor nodes is smaller. The ideas of using pre-deployment and post-deployment knowledges for the key pre-distribution techniques in a sensor network are two mutually orthogonal techniques. Therefore, it may be desirable to combine them together to provide better performances. In this paper, we propose a scheme which takes advantages of both pre-deployment and post-deployment knowledges of the deployed sensor nodes in a sensor network. Our scheme significantly improves the performance of establishing pairwise keys between neighbor sensor nodes than the existing previous key pre-distribution schemes. Moreover, it provides a better trade-off among network connectivity, communication overhead, computational overhead, storage requirement and security against node capture than the existing schemes. In addition, it supports addition of new sensor nodes after the initial deployment of sensor nodes and also works for any deployment topology.