Key Management Schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET’s) is one of the most promising fields for research and development of wireless network. Security is an important feature that determines the success and degree of deployment of MANETs. A mobile Ad-hoc network is a self configuring and not having fixed infrastructure, because of its dynamic topology. Since each node in MANET is free to move independently, therefore each node can change its links to other nodes frequently. Secure communication among nodes in mobile Ad-hoc networks is a major concern and need of secure, efficient and dynamic key management scheme for the communication.

Many key management schemes and protocols have been evolved in past years, but developing fundamentally secure key management scheme and dynamic key management scheme for MANET's is still an open research challenge. In this paper, we have presented an extensive survey on key management in mobile Ad-hoc networks (wireless sensor networks), with their applications. We have categorized and subcategorized various key management schemes which have been developed in past years. Future challenges, improvements and research directions also discussed.