An Optimal Key Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

For wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a common assumption in most existing distributed key management schemes is that all sensor nodes have the same capability. However, recent studies have suggested that connectivity and lifetime of a sensor network can be substantially improved if some nodes are given greater power and transmission capability. Accordingly, this paper investigates the key management in heterogeneous WSNs (HWSNs). In particular, we use the cost, key connectivity, and resilience as objectives to formulate a key management optimization problem. To obtain the near-optimal solution to this problem, we further develop a genetic algorithm (GA) based approach. Numerical results show that our proposed key management scheme has satisfying performance.