Security of Mobile and Heterogeneous Wireless Networks in Battlefields

Wireless communications are central part of the new military doctrines, based on interacting networks in the physical, information, cognitive, and social domains. In particular, it is important to enable flexible and secure communications among groups of stationary nodes, such as sensor nodes that collect information about the battlefield, and mobile nodes that operate in the same environment, such as solders, vehicles, and so on. The security of information in such highly dynamic environment is paramount. Therefore, we have developed a new security scheme based on key distribution among stationary sensor and ad hoc networks, and mobile nodes. Our scheme is based on key predistribution using a large key pool, which is segmented into smaller key pools. Each of these segments acts as the key pool for different stationary sensor networks. The mobile nodes get keys from the aggregate of all these segments. The aggregate key pool can have some segments which can be used for future deployments. We have performed extensive analysis and simulations to validate the proposed scheme.