Title: PERSEN: power-efficient logical ring based key management for clustered sensor networks

Authors: A.S. Poornima, B.B. Amberker

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Siddaganaga Institute of Technology, Tumkur, Karnataka, India. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Warangal, Andhra Pradesh, India

Abstract: Cluster-based organisation is widely used to achieve energy efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). To achieve confidentiality of the sensed data, it is necessary to have a secret key shared between a node and its Cluster Head (CH). Key management is challenging as the CH changes in every round in cluster-based organisation. In this paper, we propose two schemes for key management in clustered sensor networks with changing CH. In Simple Secure Logical Ring (SSLR) scheme, communication and computation cost incurred for key establishment is constant. In Burmester Desmedt Logical Ring (BDLR) scheme, key establishment is achieved by performing (n + 1) multiplications and (n + 5) communications, where n is the number of nodes in the cluster. Simulation results show that node compromise in the proposed schemes is handled efficiently.

Keywords: cluster-based WSNs; cluster heads; sensor nodes; cluster key; logical ring; key management; wireless sensor networks; wireless networks; secret keys; simulation; confidentiality; secure data; network security; privacy protection; cryptography.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2011.040907

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2011 Vol.10 No.1/2, pp.94 - 103

Published online: 26 Jun 2011 *

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