An Effective Lightweight Key Management (ELWKM) Model for Wireless Sensor Networks using Distributed Spanning Tree Structure

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are resource-constrained and frequently deployed in potentially adverse surroundings and so the security issues in these networks are serious concern. There are a number of security issues in the WSNs and the one that overwhelmingly studied and attracted the researcher in the recent years is the key management issues of network. Though researchers have proposed various key management schemes to enhance the secure information transfer, the existing works lack in the tradeoff between its efficiency and the cost in terms of the factors like structure formulation, energy utilization and key storage overheads. In this perspective, an effective Lightweight Key Management Model (LKMM) for WSNs has been proposed using the Distributed Spanning Tree (DST). In this model, the WSN is virtually structured into Distributed Spanning Tree Structure (DSTs) and a lightweight key exchange model is included in the structure. The simulation results justify the merits of the proposed Effective Lightweight Key Management Model (ELWKM) in terms of computation time, energy consumption, energy utilization percentage, number of unique keys, key storage overheads and message to key ratio.