Hierarchical Self-healing Key Distribution for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Self-healing group key distribution aims to achieve robust key distribution over lossy channels in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, all existing self-healing group key distribution schemes in the literature consider homogenous WSNs which are known to be unscalable. Heterogeneous WSNs have better scalability and performance than homogenous ones. We are thus motivated to study hierarchial self-healing group key distribution, tailored to the heterogeneous WSN architecture. In particular, we revisit and adapt Dutta et al.’s model to the setting of hierarchical self-healing group key distribution, and propose a concrete scheme that achieves computational security and high efficiency.