A Location-Adaptive Key Establishment Scheme for Large-Scale Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The establishment of pairwise keys between communicating neighbor nodes in sensor networks is a challenging problem due to the unsuitability of public-key cryptographic techniques for the resource-constrained platforms of sensor networks and also due to vulnerability of physical captures of sensor nodes by an adversary/enemy. In this paper, we propose a new location-adaptive key establishment scheme which is considered as an improved alternative to the path key establishment phase of bootstrapping protocol in a sensor network. Our proposed scheme offers significantly better network connectivity compared to that for the path key establishment. Moreover, our scheme has better trade-off between communication overhead, computational overhead, network connectivity and resilience against node capture attack than the path key establishment.