7th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks

Research Article

A Graph Theoretic Approach for Optimizing Key Pre-distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/WIOPT.2009.5291629,
        author={Aldar C-F. Chan},
        title={A Graph Theoretic Approach for Optimizing Key Pre-distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks},
        proceedings={7th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={WIOPT},
        year={2009},
        month={10},
        keywords={key pre-distribution; sensor networks; graph theory; graph diameter; de Bruijn graph},
        doi={10.1109/WIOPT.2009.5291629}
    }
    
  • Aldar C-F. Chan
    Year: 2009
    A Graph Theoretic Approach for Optimizing Key Pre-distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks
    WIOPT
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/WIOPT.2009.5291629
Aldar C-F. Chan1,*
  • 1: School of Computing National University of Singapore
*Contact email: aldar@comp.nus.edu.sg

Abstract

Finding an optimal key assignment (subject to given constraints) for a key predistribution scheme in wireless sensor networks is a difficult task. Hence, most of the practical schemes are based on probabilistic key assignment, which leads to sub-optimal schemes requiring key storage linear in the total number of nodes. A graph theoretic framework is introduced to study the fundamental tradeoffs between key storage, average key path length (directly related to the battery consumption) and resilience (to compromised nodes) of key predistribution schemes for wireless sensor networks. Based on the proposed framework, a lower bound on key storage is derived for a given average key path length. An upper bound on the compromising probability is also given. This framework also leads to the design of key assignment schemes with a storage complexity of the same order as the lower bound.