Time-Stamp-Counter Mechanism and Application on Sensor Networks

In this paper, the time-stamp-counter mechanism is applied to sensor networks. This mechanism improves the security, scalability, and flexibility of sensor network. It supports larger sensor networks. A designer can choose to trade off between many different kinds of resources. By applying this mechanism to SNEP as an example, it shows that our protocol can automatically synchronize counters, which makes the counter exchange protocol of SNEP an option not a must. Pair-wise counter is not a must. Instead, a dynamic counter allocation can be used, which reduces the number of counters. The mechanism also reduces the counter length. All of this resource reducing is important for resource limited networks, such as sensor networks and home networks.