An Improved Efficient Key Distribution Mechanism for Large-Scale Heterogeneous Mobile Sensor Networks

Due to resource constraints of the sensor nodes, traditional public key cryptographic techniques are not feasible in most sensor network architectures. Several symmetric key distribution mechanisms are proposed for establishing pairwise keys between sensor nodes in sensor networks, but most of them are not scalable and also are not much suited for mobile sensor networks because they incur much communication as well as computational overheads. Moreover, these schemes are either vulnerable to a small number of compromised sensor nodes or involve expensive protocols for establishing keys. In this paper, we introduce a new scheme for establishing keys between sensor nodes with the help of additional high-end sensor nodes, called the auxiliary nodes. Our scheme provides unconditional security against sensor node captures and high network connectivity. In addition, our scheme requires minimal storage requirement for storing keys mainly due to only a single key before deployment in each node in the sensor network, supports efficiently addition of new nodes after initial deployment and also works for any deployment topology.