Energy Efficient Cluster Based key Management Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is vulnerable to node capture attacks in which an attacker can capture one or more sensor nodes and reveal all stored security information which enables him to compromise a part of the WSN communications. Due to large number of sensor nodes and lack of information about deployment and hardware capabilities of sensor node, key management in wireless sensor networks has become a complex task. Limited memory resources and energy constraints are the other issues of key management in WSN. Hence an efficient key management scheme is necessary which reduces the impact of node capture attacks and consume less energy. In this paper, we develop a cluster based technique for key management in wireless sensor network. Initially, clusters are formed in the network and the cluster heads are selected based on the energy cost, coverage and processing capacity. The sink assigns cluster key to every cluster and an EBS key set to every cluster head. The EBS key set contains the pairwise keys for intra-cluster and inter-cluster communication. During data transmission towards the sink, the data is made to pass through two phases of encryption thus ensuring security in the network. By simulation results, we show that our proposed technique efficiently increases packet delivery ratio with reduced energy consumption.