A Survey about Key Pre-distribution Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract — Wireless sensor network (WSN) has a wide range of applications in military as well as in civilian services. As wireless sensor networks continue to grow, so does the need for effective security mechanisms. Because sensor networks may interact with sensitive data and/or operate in hostile unattended environments and also nearly all aspects of wireless sensor network defenses relying on solid encryption and mainly key predistribution is a challenging task in sensor networks. Because the neighbor of a node after the deployment of sensors is unknown. An attacker can easily obtain a large number of keys by capturing a small fraction of nodes, and hence, can gain control of the network by deploying a replicated nodes or packets preloaded with some compromised keys. For secure communication, neighbors must possess a secret common key or there must exist a key-path among these nodes. In this paper I have discussed in brief about various key pre-distribution schemes for homogeneous sensor networks and I had analyzed merits and demerits for each of them. Among various schemes a suitable scheme can be chosen based on the requirement and the resource availability of the sensors