Using Residual Design for Key Management in Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Combinatorial designs are powerful structures for key management in wireless sensor networks to address good connectivity and also security against external attacks in large scale networks. Many researchers have used key pre-distribution schemes using combinatorial structures in which key-rings, are pre-distributed to each sensor node before deployment in a real environment. Regarding the restricted resources, key distribution is a great engagement and challenging issue in providing sufficient security in wireless sensor networks. To provide secure communication, a unique key should be found from their stored key-rings. Most of the key pre-distribution protocols based on public-key mechanisms could not support highly scalable networks due to their key storage overhead and communication cost that linearly increasing. In this paper, we introduce a new key distribution approach for hierarchical clustered wireless sensor networks. Each cluster has a construction that contains new points or that reinforces and builds upon similar ideas of their head clusters. Based on Residual Design as a powerful algebraic combinatorial architecture and hierarchical network model, our approach guarantees good connectivity between sensor nodes and also cluster heads. Compared with similar existing schemes, our approach can provide sufficient security no matter if the cluster head or normal sensor node is compromised