A novel key management scheme for heterogeneous sensor networks based on the position of nodes

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have many applications in the areas of commercial, military and environmental requirements. Regarding the deployment of low cost sensor nodes with restricted energy resources, these networks face a lot of security challenges. A basic approach for preparing a secure wireless communication in WSNs, is to propose an efficient cryptographic key management protocol between sensor nodes to achieve maximum security with minimum cost. The main motivation of this paper is to apply the position of the sensor nodes as part of their identity for key management in heterogeneous sensor networks. In the proposed scheme, the position of sensor nodes is considered as a part of their identity and it is used for authentication and dedicating key to all network links. Comparing the proposed technique with other schemes shows that it has a higher level of scalability, security, and reliability with less memory complexity.