Performance Analysis of Key Management Schemes in Wireless Sensor Network Using Analytic Hierarchy Process

To achieve security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), key management is one of the most challenging issues in design of WSN due to resource-constrained sensor nodes. Various key management schemes (KMs) have been proposed to enable encryption and authentication in WSN for different application scenarios. According to different requirements, it is important to select the trustworthy KMs in a WSN for setting up a fully appropriate WSN mechanism. An Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)-aided method helping with the complex decision has been presented in our previous work. Our purpose in this paper is to do performance analysis of KMs in WSN using our previous AHP-aided method. We analyze the characters of abundance KMs intuitively. The following five performance criteria are considered: scalability, key connectivity, resilience, storage overhead and communication overhead. As all permutations of five performance criteria include 120 types´ situations, experimental analyses on 43 KMs for the optimum selection are presented.