A Robust Key Management Scheme Based on Node Hierarchy for Wireless Sensor Networks

Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of a wireless sensor network mainly rely on the reliable and secure communication. To meet these, we have designed a robust key management scheme to ensure security for wireless sensor networks. This scheme presents a hierarchical network topology in terms of key generation and distribution to incorporate secure data routing in-between the source and the destination. Thus, it emphasizes on key management tasks distributed at different levels of node, minimized key storage at each node, even minimized re-key messages for data encryption and decryption in preparing against any node compromised in the network. In the evaluation, our scheme significantly reduces the cost of key generation and distribution, even the computational overhead.