Key management and secure routing in heterogeneous sensor networks

Key management is very critical to security protocols, as encryption and authentication services are based on the operations involving keys. In this paper, we propose a key management scheme based on random key pre-distribution for heterogeneous sensor network (HSN) to achieve better performance and security as compared to homogeneous network which suffer from high communication overhead, computation overhead, and/or high storage requirements. In a key pre-distribution phase, all the keys of the key pool are assigned to H-sensors and only one key of that pool is assigned to L-sensor, which significantly reduce the storage requirements while providing the full network connectivity. Further a secure routing structure is also proposed as application of our proposed key management scheme. Analysis shows that the proposed scheme is more resilient against node capture as compare to other random key distribution schemes.