Key management in wireless sensor networks with inter-network sensor roaming

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are considered to be an ideal solution for many commercial and industrial applications due to their low-cost and easy deployability. However, Security is a critical concern in WSNs due to the technical challenge of providing sufficient security with battery-powered sensors that have limited computational resources. Although numerous advancements have been made in the field of key management in WSNs, most have focused on establishing keys within a single WSN. In addition, many have assumed that the locations of the sensors are fixed. As the number of WSN applications increases, there is an increasing demand for solutions that allow sensors to securely roam between different WSNs even when the WSNs are managed by independent organizations. This paper presents a base station-to-sensor pairwise key management protocol that allows sensor nodes to relocate to other WSNs as required by the application. In addition, the proposed solution localizes the damage that can arise when a sensor or a base-station is compromised without increasing the computational burden on the sensors. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first few works to address the pairwise key distribution problem in WSNs that allow nodes to roam between different, independent networks.