Developing a group-based security scheme for wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a group-based security scheme for distributed wireless sensor networks. The scheme is proposed with 3-types of entities: one or more base stations, Y number of group dominator nodes, and N number of ordinary sensor nodes. We model the group-based deployment using Gaussian (normal) distribution and show that more than 85% network connectivity can be achieved with the proposed model. The small groups with pre-shared secrets form the secure groups where group dominators form the backbone of the network. The scheme is devised for dealing with sensory data aggregated by groups of collocated sensors; i.e., local sensed data are collected by the dominating nodes and sent an aggregated packet to the base station via other group dominators. The scheme is shown to be light-weight, and it offers a stronger defense against node capture attacks. Analysis and simulation results are presented to defend our proposal. Analysis shows that robustness can significantly be improved by increasing the deployment density using both the dominating and/or ordinary sensor nodes.