LNT: A logical neighbor tree secure group communication scheme for wireless sensor networks

Secure group communication is a paradigm that primarily designates one-to-many communication security. The proposed works relevant to secure group communication have predominantly considered the whole network as being a single group managed by a central powerful node capable of supporting heavy communication, computation and storage cost. However, a typical Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) may contain several groups, and each one is maintained by a sensor node (the group controller) with constrained resources. Moreover, the previously proposed schemes require a multicast routing support to deliver the rekeying messages. Nevertheless, multicast routing can incur heavy storage and communication overheads in the case of a wireless sensor network. Due to these two major limitations, we have reckoned it necessary to propose a new secure group communication with a lightweight rekeying process. Our proposal overcomes the two limitations mentioned above, and can be applied to a homogeneous WSN with resource-constrained nodes with no need for a multicast routing support. Actually, the analysis and simulation results have clearly demonstrated that our scheme outperforms the previous well-known solutions. Procedia Computer Science 00 (2012) 1–47 Procedia Computer Science LNT: A Logical Neighbor Tree Secure Group Communication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks Omar Cheikhrouhoua,∗, Anis Koubâab,c, Gianluca Dinie, Hani Alzaidd, Mohamed Abida aCES Research Unit, National School of Engineers of Sfax, University of Sfax, Tunisia. bCISTER Research Unit, Polytechnic Institute of Porto (ISEP/IPP), Portugal. cCOINS Research Group, Al-Imam Mohamed bin Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. dComputer Research Institute, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia. eDipartimento di Ingegneria della Informazione University of Pisa, Via Diotisalvi 2, 56100 PISA, Italy.