A Lightweight Key Management Protocol for Hierarchical Sensor Networks

Key management is a fundamental security service in distributed sensor networks. In this paper, the focus is to design a lightweight group key management scheme to safeguard the data packet passing on the sensor networks under different types of attacks. We propose an energy efficient level-based hierarchical system and build the secure route from the source node to sink node. We compromise between the energy consumption and the shortest path by utilizing the number of neighbors (NBR) of a sensor when renewing a cluster head or choosing the next hop in the hierarchical clusters. In addition, our protocol contains group communication policies, group membership requirements and an algorithm for generating a distributed group key for secure communication