Key Distribution Schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks: Novel Classification and Analysis

Abstract

Security is one of the important and challenging aspects in wireless sensor network owing to their wireless nature combined with limited memory, energy, and computation. We can classify security issue of the wireless sensor network into five broad categories as cryptography techniques, key management, routing protocols, intrusion detection and data aggregation. Since the key management forms an underlying factor for efficient routing protocol and cryptography in wireless sensor network, we focus on key management issue. This paper outlines the constraints, security requirements and attacks, which are related to the key management and routing. Further novel classification of key distribution schemes have been proposed. The proposed novel classification and comparison distinctly brings to the fore gaps in the existing solutions of research which can be put to use by researchers in the area to identify current challenges for designing efficient key distribution scheme. The paper concludes with possible future research directions on key distribution in WSNs.KeywordsKey distribution schemesSecuritySensor network