A novel clustering paradigm for key pre-distribution: Toward a better security in homogenous WSNs

Homogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs) are a class of WSNs in which nodes have identical hardware configurations. A HWSN inherits the same constraints from WSNs such as limited processing capacity and resources. However, the unique characteristic of HWSNs gets more attention for recent security applications. The environment of these applications mandates lightweight security provisions, especially a key management protocol that endures security threats such as node capture attack. On the other hand, the limited computation and communication capabilities of sensor nodes make it hard to deal with such security threats. Thus, in this paper, we introduce a novel clustering paradigm to be used in a key pre-distribution key management scheme designed for HWSNs. Then, we develop a cluster-based key pre-distribution based on this paradigm. Our developed scheme improves the security dramatically by partitioning sensor nodes to the disjointed clusters and letting clusters to be inter-connected via randomly selected nodes as consular nodes from all the clusters to form a universal cluster. As opposed to the adopted schemes, we provide a comprehensive analysis for both sensor node connectivity, and resiliency against node capture attack, and also computational results are presented.