Research Of Group Key Management Scheme In Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network, which is currently a new research hotspot in IT field, is widely used invarious aspects, such as military, security, transportation, environmental protection, medical care,disaster relief and so on. Key management is one of the most important and basic researches onsecurity of WSNs, and is the basis of information encryption and entity authentication forcommunication. Group key management is an important branch of key management. Alow-overload communication is inevitably requirement in WSNs of huge nodes and limited energy,so an efficient and secure group communication would be necessary. Therefore, researches on groupkey management proposal of low overhead and high security are of great significance in WSNs.The main work and conclusions are as follows.1. Firstly, introduces the basic requirements of security communications, the design principlesand classification of group key management. Then the architecture, applications and characteristicsof WSNs are given. Mainly introduces the development and research status of the WSN group keymanagement.2. Three kinds of group key management schemes–centralized, distributed and hierarchicalgrouping, which are used in traditional networks, are introduced. We enumerate two group keymanagement schemes used in wireless sensor network environment and analyze the advantages anddisadvantages of these schemes.3. Group manager undertakes almost all the key computation, regeneration, transmission etc. inconventional centralized flat group key management schemes. To avoid these disadvantages, anovel centralized flat scheme HMKM is presented. All members and manager in the groups cangenerate group keys equally in the scheme, and this kind of management mode shows theunification of centralization, distribution and verification. HMKM scheme can guarantee highsecurity with certain advantage of computation in the sensor nodes.4. To eliminate the disadvantages of employing single centralization/distributed keymanagement, such as single point failure, management inconvenience, high resources consumption,inflexibility and decreased robustness, a new hierarchical grouping multicast key managementscheme is proposed. The network architecture of the scheme is divided into two layers, in whichapply independent key negotiation algorithm to generate and update corresponding group key. Thecomputing workload and memory overhead are proportioned and optimized by the layered logicstructure, which avoid the performance bottleneck of the group controller of centralizedmanagement and overcome the disadvantage of absent centralized control of distributed management. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme hasadvantages in memory overhead, scalability and security, and would be deployed in the large-scaleWSNs.