Wireless Sensor Network Key Distribution Strategy Study

Wireless sensor networks developed rapidly in recent years due to their wide applications. The sensor networks are consists of large numbers of sensor nodes which can react with the environment. In typical applications, the sensor nodes are widely deployed in the target area to collect data. Every sensor node collaborates with each other to accomplish their tasks. Sensor nodes are highly resource constrained, typically low energy and battery powered. They are deployed in hard environments and the power limits their life. Sensor nodes are equipped with integrated sensors, limited data processing capabilities and short-range radio communications. Sensor networks have wide applications. Example applications include fireproofing, volcano and earthquake monitoring, environment monitoring and military target-tracking. When sensor nodes are deployed in adversarial environments they are prone to traffic-listening and other different types of malicious attacks, security becomes extremely important. Example attacks include traffic listening and impersonate one of the nodes, or intentionally provide misleading information to other nodes. To provide secure communications the messages should be encrypted and authenticated. So the key distribution and management become the key point.This paper briefly introduces the conceptions and corresponding contents of sensor networks and then presents a key distribution mechanism and analysis the connectivity of the network, nodes joining or leaving the network, traffic and routing improving, analysis the malicious attacks and counter measures.It is an important and difficult point in the project that the distribution of the network. We introduce the key management tree as the basic structure of the whole mechanism. Due to resource constraints on sensors, many key management techniques used in traditional networks are not suitable for wireless sensor networks. We proposed a key pre-distribution and dynamic distribution scheme based on deployment knowledge of the sensors that constructs a key management tree to achieve the distributed and integrated key management. The scheme can substantially improve a network's security and connectivity, it also can avoid additional traffic overhead. And this scheme analysis different kinds of malicious attacks and counter measures. The key management tree is the kernel of the whole mechanism, which is an effective way to improving the performance of the whole network.