A Novel Method for Key Establishment Based on Symmetric Cryptography in Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Most of recent researches carried out into wireless sensor networks are concerned with homogeneous networks in which all network nodes have the same features and key management mechanisms presented for them aim to enable as many nodes to establish shared cryptographic keys as possible. Hierarchical networks have shown a better performance because of using clustering features. This issue motivated us to present a method for key establishment in hierarchical wireless sensor networks based on symmetric cryptography. Since symmetric cryptosystems consume to have low energy, they are a good choice for sensor networks. Although symmetric cryptosystems consume to have high memory, this shortcoming can be diminished by appropriate techniques. The simulation results have shown that our proposed method can significantly reduce the memory consumption resulted from saving keys alongside reducing the energy consumption resulted from communications in all network nodes than related works while it presents a favorable level of security.