Energy Efficient Key Management in Wireless Sensor Networks using Multivariate Polynomials
Krishna Teja Nanduri · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 2017
A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are a collection of tiny devices (Sensor Nodes SNs) that are deployed in an environment and with the help of in-built sensors and transceivers, record and collect data about the surroundings.All the data gathered by these devices is transmitted via other SNs using radio waves to a central base station (BS) which collects and processes the information.Such WSNs can be deployed anywhere with variable number of SNs depending on the requirement of the user.Appropriate transducers with the SNs can be used to gather information like environmental data, Health data, Temperature, Humidity, etc.They are usually deployed in areas that are hard to access or is access restricted.This means that the SNs must last long enough that the batteries on the SN or the SN itself need not be replaced too often.These networks usually have many constraints that limit how they function like Energy of nodes, security of transmissions, etc.Any wireless network being deployed must take these constraints into account and try to address them in their life cycle.Energy efficiency and Security are two most important aspects considered when deploying a wireless network.Energy efficiency is critical as the SNs must last long period of time and Security is favored as most of the transmitted data in the network is private.In this thesis, we discuss various security methods employed in the management of keys like the asymmetric, symmetric and Hybrid Key management systems.We go into detail about the various polynomial based key management systems and how they help improve the security of a network.We describe various existing polynomial based schemes that exist today and explain their functionality.We also describe what hashing algorithms are and show how they function.We then introduce a multivariate polynomial based scheme that we propose as a part of this thesis.We describe how the network is initiated, how the polynomial keys and variables are ii distributed to the SNs at the initialization time and how these are used to establish secure links between two SNs to allow transmission of data.We simulate our proposed algorithm in a WSN of various sizes to observe how it behaves.We verify that the proposed system improves energy consumption of the system based on data gathered from the system we show its superior performance by comparing how our scheme performs as compared to other existing methods of key management.