New key pre‐distribution scheme based on combinatorial design for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Key pre-distribution in wireless sensor networks is an important area of research due to limited resource availability in sensor nodes. In this study, the authors propose a novel key pre-distribution scheme for wireless sensor networks based on combinatorial design. The proposed scheme is used to assign secret keys to the sensor nodes so that they can securely communicate among themselves. It also aims to decrease the key storage overhead and improve the overall resiliency of the network. They use the ratio of links broken/affected and the ratio of nodes disconnected to measure the resiliency when some sensor nodes are compromised in the network. They observed that the proposed scheme reduces the key storage overhead in the network while maintaining the desired connectivity among all the sensor nodes. Further, the proposed scheme is more resilient than the majority of existing schemes present in the literature.