Energy Efficient Key Distribution and Management Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

With vast areas of application ranging from household automation systems through industrial plant monitoring systems to military surveillance systems, security has become a major concern especially in aggressive environments like battle fields. The sensor nodes along with the data, while in transit, must be protected from malicious attackers. Though using public key cryptographic schemes like RSA and elliptic curve cryptography would provide sufficient security. Their use has been limited owing to their computationally intensive operations which conflict with the resource limitations in wireless sensor nodes. Key pre-distribution has proved to be the most feasible amongst key management schemes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Research in key management continues to take center stage due to its importance amongst security primitives in WSNs. An improved energy efficient key distribution and management scheme is proposed in this paper. Results and simulations show that the proposed scheme conserves energy and performs better than other existing techniques.