A Decentralized Hierarchical Key Management Scheme for Grid-Organized Wireless Sensor Networks (DHKM)

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are attracted great attention in the past decade due to the unlimited number of applications they support. However, security has always been a serious concern for these networks due to the insecure communication links they exploit. In order to mitigate the possible security threats, sophisticated key management schemes must be employed to ensure the generating, distributing and revocation of the cryptographic keys that are needed to implement variety of security measures. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized key management scheme for hierarchical grid organized WSNs. The main goal of our scheme is to reduce the total number of cryptographic keys stored in sensor nodes while maintaining the desired network connectivity. The performance analysis shows the efficiency of the proposed protocol in terms of communication overhead, storage cost and network connectivity.