Key Management for Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks: A Robust Scheme

Secure data transmission within the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a critical issue as they are mostly deployed in the open areas. Moreover, the communication between the cluster head (CH) and the base station(BS) in a hierarchical WSN is required to be more secure since the CH is responsible for data collection, aggregation and its forwarding to the BS. Thus, this paper aims to design a hybrid key management scheme (KMS) for the hierarchical WSNs for enhancing security between the CH and BS by using some asymmetric cryptographic technique while applying the secret key based communication among the member nodes to reduce their computational overheads. The security analysis of our proposed scheme exhibits its robustness against the node capture attack and its ability to support the node revocation. The performances of proposed scheme are also evaluated in term of data freshness, average number of keys established, throughput and computational cost to demonstrate its efficiency.