Special Issue Article Open Access

Unital Design Based Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Given the sensitivity of the potential applications of wireless sensor networks, security emerges as a challenging issue in these networks. Because of the resource limitations, symmetric key establishment is one favorite paradigm for securing WSN. One of the main concerns when designing a key management scheme for WSN is the network scalability. In this paper, new highly scalable key establishment scheme was proposed for WSN. For that purpose, we make use, for the first time, of the unital design theory. The basic mapping from unitals to pair wise key establishment allows to achieve an extremely high network scalability while degrading, however, the key sharing probability. An enhanced unital-based predistribution approach was proposed which provides high network scalability and good key sharing probability. The obtained results show that our approach enhances considerably the network scalability while providing good overall performances. Our solutions reduce significantly the storage overhead at equal network size compared to existing solutions.

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