A Comprehensive Survey on Various key Management Schemes in WSN

A numbers of distributed autonomous sensor nodes are deployed in a wireless sensor network environment for carrying out multiple tasks. Data packets transmitted in wireless sensor network needs to be protected. Security keys can be generated and used to transmit data securely. These security key generation task needs to be properly managed in WSN. Efficient key management assists in providing confidentiality, integrity to the transmitted information. The security keys, if properly managed, blocks unauthorized users from accessing the transmitted data. Numerous key management mechanisms have been proposed in research literature. This proposed work presents a detailed survey performed on the current set of widely practiced key management techniques in WSNs. Both asymmetric encryption and hybrid type of encryption techniques are applied in key management. The survey presented analyzes the various key management techniques pertaining to computational overhead, communication complexity, energy consumption, robustness and scalability. The survey will be helpful for researchers in selecting the appropriate key management technique specific to their application needs.