Random Pair-wise Key Management for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Abstract

A wireless sensor network consisting of a large number of small sensors with battery-powered transceivers can be an effective tool for gathering data in a variety of environments. The data collected by each sensor is communicated through the network to a single processing center. The protocol must be designed to conserve the limited energy resources. Most recently works on sensor networks consider heterogeneous designs. Sensors are clustered into groups, so that sensors communicate information only to cluster-heads and then the cluster-heads communicate the aggregated information to the processing center. In this way, it may save energy. In this paper, we take full consideration of the fact that a sensor only communicates with a small portion of its neighbors and pair-wise keys are easy configuration management. We propose a general random pair-wise key management framework and an efficient protocol for heterogeneous sensor networks. The experiment and analysis show that our key management protocol can maintain the pair-wise key features, which is easy configuration management, ensure the connectivity rate, decrease network traffic, and reduce storage burden.