An Efficient Key Management Scheme for Data-Centric Storage Wireless Sensor Networks

Data-centric storage wireless sensor networks in general provide in-network node repositories to keep sensory data for later use. However, most of previous studies pay less attention to data security issues, so that the sensory data could be easily explored to the intruders. The pDCS scheme although has implemented with data protection mechanism, it incurs a lot of rekeying message traffics while a node was compromised, and thus greatly consumes network energy. In this paper, based on the Exclusion Basis System (EBS), we propose an efficient and distributed key management protocol, termed as ERP-DCS, to improve pDCS's deficiency. Through extensive simulations, we conclude that: at a slight increase on the number of keys (about one more key) stored in each node, the proposed scheme can achieve about 70% reduction on rekeying message overheads, and thus elongates the network lifetime. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.