Cross layer implementation of key establishment protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Security in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) can be achieved by establishing shared keys among the sensor nodes having possibility to communicate in the field. However, to achieve the optimum network operation after the deployment, there may be no need to establish keys for all the possible links. Because, links to be established are defined by the network configuration and as long as the network connectivity requirement is satisfied number of links to be secured can be limited accordingly. In this sense, key establishment and network configuration performances are related to each other and this cross relation should be considered when implementing security for WSN. In this paper, we have investigated the cross layer relations and performance variations of the selected pre-distribution and public key based key establishment protocols with the network configuration protocol proposed in [6]. We have proposed three methods as straight, reactive and proactive for selection of links to be secured and simulated the performance in terms of network connectivity, total energy cost and resilience to node capture attack. Simulation results indicate that total energy cost can be reduced by reducing the number of links to be secured without affecting the connectivity performance of the configuration protocol. Also we have figured out that the energy and resilience performance of the public key establishment is better than the key pre-distribution for the given network configuration parameters. © 2009 IEEE.