KMSPN: A key management analyze model for sensor networks

As sensor networks have widely been used in military and civilian areas, security guarded by key management is more and more critical to the communication between sensor nodes. However, most researches are focus on proposing new pair wise-based key management scheme, little consider with how to systemize the process of evaluating those schemes. In this paper, based on the description of the structure of key management mechanism, we extend stochastic Petri nets into KMSPN (Key Management SPN) according to features of sensor networks, and establish a logical expression of key management. After constructing the sub-models of pair-wise key establishment, path-key establishment and rekey, we propose two KMSPN models of key management model: static model and dynamic model. Then we use the KMSPN model proposed before to analyze a concrete protocol, by calculating the latency and throughput of the protocol. The results of performance evaluation and simulation analysis show that how the latency and throughput will be affected while the attributions such as network scale, key size and so on are changed. KMSPN provides a feasible and correct guidance to design, analyze, and choose the protocols, by accurately predicting the performance of key management protocols in sensor networks.