Secure data collection in Sensor Networks using tree based key management scheme and secret sharing

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of a large number of nodes with limited sensing, computation and communication capabilities. Due to resource constrained sensor nodes, it is important to minimize the amount of data transmission which in turn increases the overall network life time. Use of Mobile Agents for various operations like data collection and software updates in Wireless Sensor Networks is receiving significant attention recently as it increases the lifetime of the network. Security plays a very important role when mobile agents are used for data collection. In this paper we propose and prototype simple authentication schemes based on tree based key management scheme and secret sharing. The proposed schemes identify malicious nodes acting as mobile agents and used to counter the various attacks launched by malicious nodes.