Designing Securely Connected Wireless Sensor Networks in the Presence of Unreliable Links

We investigate the secure connectivity of wireless sensor networks under the pairwise key distribution scheme of Chan et al.. Unlike recent work which was carried out under the assumption of full visibility, here we assume a (simplified) communication model where unreliable wireless links are represented as on/off channels. We present conditions on how to scale the model parameters so that the network i) has no secure node which is isolated, and ii) is securely connected, both with high probability when the number of sensor nodes becomes large. The results are given in the form of zero-one laws, and exhibit significant differences with corresponding results in the full visibility case.