Hierarchical Grid-Based Pairwise Key Predistribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of huge number of sensor nodes which are small and inexpensive with very limited resources. The public key cryptography is undesirable to be used in WSN because of the limitations of the resources. A key management and predistribution techniques are required to apply the symmetric key cryptography in such a big network. Many key predistribution techniques and approaches have been proposed, but few of them considered the real WSN assumptions. In this paper, we propose a security framework that is based on a hierarchical grid for WSN considering the proper assumptions of the communication traffic and required connectivity. We apply simple keying material distribution scheme to measure the value of our framework. Finally, we provide security analysis for possible security threats in WSN.