Communication pattern based key establishment scheme in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a symmetric key establishment scheme for wireless sensor networks which tries to minimize the resource usage while satisfying the security requirements. This is accomplished by taking advantage of the communication pattern of wireless sensor networks and adopting heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. By considering the unique communication pattern of wireless sensor networks due to the nature of information gathering from the physical world, the number of keys to be established is minimized and, consequently, the overhead spent for establishing keys decreases. With heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, we can build a hybrid scheme where a small number of powerful nodes do more works than a large number of resource-constrained nodes to provide enhanced security service such as broadcast authentication and reduce the burden of resource-limited nodes. In addition, an on-demand key establishment scheme is introduced to support extra communications and optimize the resource usage. Our performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is very efficient and highly scalable in terms of storage, communication and computation overhead. Furthermore, our proposed scheme not only satisfies the security requirements but also provides resilience to several attacks.