Highly resilient key distribution strategy for multi-level heterogeneous sensor networks by using deployment knowledge

The most important problem in the security of wireless sensor network (WSN) is to distribute keys for the sensor nodes and to establish a secure channel in an insecure environment. Since the sensor node has limited resources, for instance, low battery life and low computational power, the key distribution scheme must be designed in an efficient manner. Recently many studies added a few high-level nodes into the network, called the heterogeneous sensor network (HSN). Most of these studies considered an application for two-level HSN instead of multi-level one. In this paper, we propose some definitions for multi-level HSN, and design a novel key management strategy based on the polynomial hash tree (PHT) method by using deployment knowledge. Our proposed strategy has lower computation and communication overheads but higher connectivity and resilience.