An Efficient Key Distribution Mechanism for Large Scale Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) usually contain a large number of wireless sensor devices to monitor and/or control particular parameters. In many applications, the wireless nodes are powered by a small battery which makes the energy consumption a major challenge in designing proper communication protocols and services for WSNs.□One of the key issues in WSNs is key distribution in a safe way. There are many methods for key distribution in the clustering networks. Clustering is one of the promising mechanisms which aims at reducing the energy consumption of the wireless nodes, and thus enlarging the lifetime of the WSN. In this paper, we propose an Efficient Key Distribution Mechanism (EKDM), which is derived from the symmetric polynomial method. Performance analysis reveals that the EKDM against the compromise attack is quite robust, and compared to many other schemes, the cluster heads (CHs) use a more efficient method that reduces the amount of computational overhead, while memory usage is not much more than previous schemes. Moreover, the EKDM fully supports node addition, and key freshness. Consequently, in addition to the high flexibility to determine the appropriate level of security, it requires a small energy consumption.