Assured Full Communication by Merging BlocksRandomly in Wireless Sensor Networks usingReed Solomon Code for Key Predistribution
Pinaki Sarkar, Aritra Dhar · International Journal of Network Security & Its Applications · 2011
Limited resources available to the sensors (nodes) constituting a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is major constraint while dealing with security of such networks.This restrict us to use symmetric key cryptography instead of public-key techniques for transmission of message amongst the nodes.In any symmetric key system, both the sender and receiver must possess the unique enciphering and deciphering key prior to exchange of message.This leads to key distribution in the sensors which in itself is a major challenge.Though there are several methods of distributing the keys, due to resource constraints, Key Predistrubution (KPD) is preferred over other techniques.It requires predistribution of keys in nodes prior to deployment and establishing immediately once deployed.However there are certain weaknesses in various existing KPD schemes.For instance, often it is not guaranteed that any given pair of nodes communicate directly.This leads one to revert to multi-hop communication involving intermediate sensor nodes resulting in increased cost of communication.In this work a key predistribution technique using Reed-Solomon codes is considered which is faced with the above weakness.The authors suggests a technique of merging certain number of sensors into blocks ensuring that the blocks have full connectivity amongst themselves.The approach also improves both time and space complexity of the system while ensuring same scalability with similar resiliency.