A mutual authentication and key establishment scheme for heterogeneous sensor networks supporting nodes mobility

In the last two decades, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have greatly attracted the attention of the research community because their flexibility, adaptability and self-organising properties make them a technology solution suitable for diverse application scenarios ranging from home and industrial automation to military surveillance. Since these networks consist of resource constrained devices and can be deployed in remote and unattended areas, supporting security could represent a challenging task especially if mobility scenarios are taken into consideration. In this context, key management facilitates the adoption of cryptography techniques to support secure data communication and to protect the resource constrained devices from various security attacks. This paper specifically focuses on mobile heterogeneous wireless sensor networks consisting of mobile sensor nodes with few fixed sensor nodes and presents a mutual authentication and key management scheme suitable for the considered scenario. Analytical and OMNET++ simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides better network connectivity, consumes less memory, has better network resilience against attacks and introduces lower communication overhead compared to state-of-the-art solutions.