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Two-Tier, Scalable and Highly Resilient Key Predistribution Scheme for Location-Aware Wireless Sensor Network Deployments

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Abstract

We propose a probabilistic key predistribution scheme for wireless sensor networks, where keying materials are distributed to sensor nodes for secure communication. We use a two-tier approach in which there are two types of nodes: regular nodes and agent nodes. Agent nodes are more capable than regular nodes. Our node deployment model is zone-based such that the nodes that may end up with closer positions on ground are grouped together. The keying material of nodes that belong to different zones is non-overlapping. However, it is still possible for nodes that belong to different zones to communicate with each other via agent nodes when needed. We give a comparative analysis of our scheme through simulations and show that our scheme provides good connectivity figures at reasonable communication cost by using minimal flooding in key distribution. Moreover, we show that our scheme is scalable such that no extra overhead in incurred in case of increased number of nodes and sensor field size. Most importantly, simulation results show that our scheme is highly resilient to node captures.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, we use restricted flooding in which a query is broadcasted by a node only once; when the same query is received again by the same node, it is simply dropped and not broadcasted. In this way, the communication cost caused by flooding is reduced as compared to unrestricted flooding in which a particular node unnecessarily broadcasts duplicate queries.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) under grant 104E071

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Correspondence to Albert Levi.

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This paper is extended version of [19].

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Ünlü, A., Levi, A. Two-Tier, Scalable and Highly Resilient Key Predistribution Scheme for Location-Aware Wireless Sensor Network Deployments. Mobile Netw Appl 15, 517–529 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-009-0188-z

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