Performance Evaluation of Key Management Schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks usually consist of a large number of ultra-small autonomous devices. Each device, called sensor node, is battery powered and equipped with integrated sensors, a data processing unit, and a short-range radio communication unit. Sensor nodes are significantly constrained in terms of energy, memory, and computational capacity. Wireless sensor networks are being deployed in wide variety of applications, including military sensing and tracking, environment monitoring, patient monitoring and tracking, smart environments, etc. When a wireless sensor network is deployed in such hostile environment, security becomes an extremely important issue. Confidentiality, authenticity, availability, and integrity are typical security goals for wireless sensor networks. Providing these goals to secure communication among sensor nodes typically depends on the use of cryptographic schemes. When employing a cryptographic scheme, a key management service is always required. This paper investigates the most important key management schemes in wireless sensor networks. Namely, single network-wide key scheme, pairwise key establishment scheme, random key predistribution, and Q-composite random key predistribution schemes are explained in detail. These key management schemes are evaluated using OMNET++ simulator and extensive simulation results are presented.

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