Researches On Efficient Key Management Protocol For Wireless Sensor Network

Sensor networks have the ability to detect, collect and process the data information from the monitored area in real time. The application spectrum ranges from military surveillance, object tracking, habitat monitoring, the smart space, to ubiquitous computing environments. Information security is one of the most important aspects in sensor networks. The problem of how to design efficient and secure mechanisms has great significance. The design of security protocols for sensor networks should be an integrative solution, including key management, secure routing and invasion detection etc.Key management and the safe multicast protocols in the application layer will be the security domains worth researching deeply in wireless sensor networks. Particularly, researches on key management protocols receive more and more widespread attentions. In this paper, the focus is to design a lightweight group key management scheme to safeguard the data packets passing on the sensor networks under different types of attacks. First, we describe the design and implementation of an efficient key management scheme based on LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) for wireless sensor networks. The design of the protocol is motivated by the observation that many sensor nodes in the network play different roles. The paper presents different keys are set to the sensors for meeting different transmitting messages and variable security requirements. Then, we make the expansive research on the protocol, using this mechanism of key predistribution and storage in the network of the same construction. And finally, we simulate the protocol on the platform OMNeT++. Simulation results show that our key management protocol can achieve better performance. The energy consumption overhead introduced is remarkably lower compared with the original Kerberos schemes, which will be more practicable.