Group Key Management In Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a new technology, combining with computer science, microelectronics and telecommunications. It is widely applied in many fields like national defense and military, environment and medical monitoring. With the broad application of WSN, security issue is becoming more important. To ensure the security, key management is the crux. However, classic algorithms of key management can't be applied in WSN directly because of the limitation on data processing, storage capacity, battery energy and so on. Therefore, it is important to study the energy-efficient key management schemes in a WSN.On the basis of summarizing the current group key management schemes over WSN, self-healing scheme is studied in this paper. Furthermore, a new scheme which has low communication cost is proposed. The new scheme introduces the structure of key chain tree (KCT). Private keys of the sensor nodes are assigned according to their locations on the leaf of KCT. Due to the locations of revoke nodes, broadcast packets are constructed. In this way, communication cost is decreased caused by the update of session keys. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme of self-healing group key management is efficient.This paper also discusses clustering group key management, and presents a new scheme of group key management based on clustering. Many cluster head nodes exist in a clustering group, and one of them acts as cluster head. Cluster head takes charge of key management, and transmits key management information to other cluster nodes. The scheme simplifies the process of re-clustering and initialization, then decreases the communication cost caused by cluster head alternating. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme of clustering group key management is efficient.