Location-Based Key Management Structure for Secure Group Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

抄録

Many applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) require secure communication. The tree-based key management scheme, which is a symmetric key scheme, provides backward and forward secrecy. The sensor nodes in the communication group share a secret key for encrypting messages. When the sensor nodes are added to or evicted from the group, the group key has to be updated by sending rekeying messages. In this paper, we propose a method of key tree structure (KTS) generation by considering the addition and eviction ratio of sensor nodes to reduce the number of rekeying messages, which is influenced by the structure of the tree. For this, we define an extension of an existing tree structure such as a binary or ternary tree and generate KTS using an A^* algorithm. To reduce the energy consumed by the message transmission, we also exploit genetic algorithm (GA) to build a secure communication group by considering the KTS. In the paper, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with the existing structure via the simulation in terms of memory usage, the number of rekeying messages and energy consumption.