VLKM: Virtual location-based key management scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Designing an energy efficient key management scheme to secure Wireless Sensor Networks is a challenging task because sensor nodes in the network are resource constrained. If an initial key is used in the network lifetime, a key stolen by an unauthorized node will results in data compromised that is generated in the network. So a re-keying is necessary after a specified number of rounds to avoid the side effect of stale key in the network. In clustering environment, a number of keys are needed for every sensor. If the role of sensor is cluster head, then one key is required to collect data from all cluster members. This key is shared between the cluster head sensor and all the sensors which are members of that cluster. The different key is required to transfer the aggregated data to base station this key is only shared between the sensor node which is cluster head and the base station. But if the role of cluster head is changed from one sensor to different sensor randomly, a new key will be require that is share between sensor node and new cluster head and also a new key will be required that is shared between this new cluster head and the base station. If the scheme is followed then re-keying after every round is a bottleneck of the network as more than one re-keying is require for every sensor. In this paper, we have presented a new virtual location based key management scheme (VLKM). This scheme used virtual location to generate a round key for every sensor. Simulation results show that proposed scheme performs better than other comparable schemes in the literature without increasing the communication overheads.