Key pre-distribution approach using block LU decomposition in wireless sensor network

Abstract

At present, many types of applications rely on wireless sensor networks because of their availability and advantages. The working environments of the wireless sensor networks are usually hostile and difficult to access because the sensor nodes are distributed randomly to their environments. Due to the random distribution of the sensor nodes, none of these nodes can authenticate the other sensor nodes within their range. Therefore, these sensor nodes need a key agreement scheme that allows them to establish secure communication with one another, hence protecting the communicating information before being conveyed to the base station. This paper proposes a new and efficient key management scheme for wireless sensor network based on the polynomial pool-based key pre-distribution scheme and the block LU decomposition algorithm. The proposed scheme ensures that any two communicating nodes must share a common key before communication starts. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated based on network connectivity, resilience against node capture, memory overhead, energy consumption and the number of Sybil nodes and the messages needed by the adversary to break the entire network. Therefore, a simulation-based evaluation was conducted, and the simulation results were compared with related works. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs better compared to the existing approaches. The BLU-decomposition algorithm allows the proposed approach to use more than one space to obtain the shared keys and decrease the amount of pre-distributed information to the sensor nodes.