A complete hierarchical key management scheme for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Heterogeneous cluster-based wireless sensor networks (WSN) attracted increasing attention recently. Obviously, the clustering makes the entire networks hierarchical; thus, several kinds of keys are required for hierarchical network topology. However, most existing key management schemes for it place more emphasis on pairwise key management schemes or key predistribution schemes and neglect the property of hierarchy. In this paper, we propose a complete hierarchical key management scheme which only utilizes symmetric cryptographic algorithms and low cost operations for heterogeneous cluster-based WSN. Our scheme considers four kinds of keys, which are an individual key, a cluster key, a master key, and pairwise keys, for each sensor node. Finally, the analysis and experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure and efficient; thus, it is suitable for heterogeneous cluster-based WSN.