Key Sharing in Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Hierarchical wireless sensor networks (HSNs) have been widely used in many applications, especially in military areas. They usually consist of different types of nodes and behave better in performances and reliability than traditional flat wireless sensor networks (FSNs). In this paper, a novel key pre-distribution scheme is proposed for a three-tier HSN. Shamir´s secret sharing technique is implemented in intracluster pairwise key establishment. Compared with existing key management schemes, our scheme guarantees a fully connected network with less storage requirement and communication overhead of sensors. Besides, it substantially improves the network resilience against nodes capture attack and collusion attack.