CGK: A Collaborative Group Key Management Scheme

Secure communication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is usually based on symmetric cryptographic approaches, whose robustness relies on an efficient key management protocol. Most of the reported key management protocols follow either a centralized approach where a single node has the authority of distributing the global shared key, or a partially collaborative approach where key distribution is guaranteed by some master nodes. In this paper, a novel collaborative key management approach is proposed, where the whole network members participate in the key agreement task, thus, avoiding the existence of a master node, such as cluster head or BS that holds special information. Moreover, the global key is no longer propagated over the radio channel. Performance comparison with a well-known efficient scheme [1] as well as a recently reported scheme [3]shows that the proposed CGK approach reduces communication and storage overhead. Further, the analytical study of CGK is validated with simulation results.