An effective key management scheme for heterogeneous sensor networks

Security is critical for sensor networks used in military, homeland security and other hostile environments. Previous research on sensor network security mainly considers homogeneous sensor networks. Research has shown that homogeneous ad hoc networks have poor performance and scalability. Furthermore, many security schemes designed for homogeneous sensor networks suffer from high communication overhead, computation overhead, and/or high storage requirement. Recently deployed sensor network systems are increasingly following heterogeneous designs. Key management is an essential cryptographic primitive to provide other security operations. In this paper, we present an effective key management scheme that takes advantage of the powerful high-end sensors in heterogeneous sensor networks. The performance evaluation and security analysis show that the key management scheme provides better security with low complexity and significant reduction on storage requirement, compared with existing key management schemes.