Intra-cluster key sharing in hierarchical sensor networks

In hierarchical sensor networks, key sharing at the intra-cluster tier (i.e. how to establish pairwise keys between a sensor and its cluster head) is more challenging than that at inter-cluster tier. Despite some key management protocols have been proposed, there still lacks both secure and efficient one. In this study, the authors proposed an intra-cluster key sharing to overcome the security problems nowadays. The analysis proved that this proposed scheme has the following advantages by comparing with other schemes: (i) it is more efficient in saving the storage overheads and communication overheads; (ii) it improves the resilience against node capture attacks during and after initialisation; and (iii) it guarantees 100% connectivity at intra-cluster communication tier.