Research On Key Management For Wireless Sensor Networks

WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks) is composed of a large number of sensors, which have the ability of wireless communication, sensing and data processing, in an ad hoc way. Such networks have applications in battlefield, environment monitoring, medical monitoring and space exploration. In some sensitive applications of WSN, such as battlefield and business, we must consider key management which is the basis of security communication. However, duo to the limited computation, storage, energy and communication resources of sensor nodes, traditional key management methods are not fit for WSN. Consequently, it is necessary to research new key management scheme for WSN.On the basis of analyzing the current key management schemes which have disadvantage in security, key connection and storage consumption, three effective and security key management schemes are presented in this thesis. Related simulation and comparison with the current schemes show that the presented 3 schemes have a good performance and they are fit for the resources limited WSN. The main contributions of this thesis are as follows:1. With regard to the shortcoming of current polynomial-based key management schemes in security level, an enhanced polynomial-based key management which introduces an auxiliary set for each ID is presented to improve the complexity to break the polynomial coefficients.2. With regard to the disadvantage of current random key management schemes in key connection, a multi-key space based random key management is presented for WSN. The scheme ensures the full key connection through constructing suitable key link from multi-key space.3. With regard to the shortcoming of current schemes in storage consumption, a time synchronization based key management protocol is presented for WSN. The protocol combines single key mechanism and time synchronization technology to largely reduce the storage consumption of nodes and ensure the key security through updating key periodically.