Home // International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements, volume 5, numbers 3 and 4, 2012 // View article


Optimally Controlled Nonintrusive Broadcasting for Path Key Establishment Mechanism in Wireless Sensor Networks

Authors:
Aishwarya Mishra
Tibor Gyires
Yongning Tang

Keywords: sensor networks; random key predistribution;

Abstract:
Random Key Predistribution Scheme(RKPS) guarantees any pair of neighboring nodes in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) can build a secure connection either directly if a common key found, or indirectly through a Path Key Establishment Mechanism PKEM). When a sensor node resorts to PKEM to establish a secure connection with a neighboring node,it needs to broadcast a keyrequest to all securely connected nodes. However, unbounded broadcasting in PKEM can potentially cause unnecessary or duplicated broadcast message forwarding, which can intrusively incur disruptive power consumption on all involved sensor nodes in a highly resource constrained WSN. Such negative impact can be much worse if exploited by a malicious adversary to launch power exhaustion Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to sabotage a secured WSN. Thus, it is essential to convert unbounded broadcasting in PKEM to a nonintrusive broadcasting with optimally minimal message forwarding boundary in a WSN. Previous research empirically identified bounds on PKEM for small networks, which may not be suitable for densely deployed WSNs with much higher sensor node populations. In this paper, we tackle this problem by applying theoretical results to identifying the upper bound of diameter on a WSN when represented as a Erd˝os-R´enyi random graph. We then verify the performance of a broadcast bounded PKEM through simulations. The performance evaluation shows the effectiveness of the optimally bounded PKEM.

Pages: 233 to 243

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2012. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2012

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-261x