A Lightweight Key Establishment Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Key predistribution in sensor networks refers to the problem of distributing secret keys among sensor nodes prior to deployment. Recently, many key predistribution schemes have been proposed for wireless sensor networks. To further improve these techniques, researchers have also proposed to use sensors´ expected location information to help predistribution of keying materials. In this paper we propose a lightweight and scalable key establishment scheme for GPS-enabled wireless sensor networks. This scheme has little communication overhead and memory usage. Since communications and computations of key establishment schemes are done only once and when the network is begin initiated, actually the most important overhead is the memory usage. Only nine keys should be stored in sensors memory. This scheme also provides high local connectivity. We have studied the performance of this scheme using simulations and analysis. With the same storage overhead, our scheme has lower overhead comparing to other schemes.