A Novel Sub-regional Key Distribution Scheme for Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

Security is critical to any networks, including WSNs. The packets are transmitted hop by hop in WSNs over a broadcasting medium, which makes them vulnerable. So, data encryption should be employed. Due to the resource-limited nodes in WSNs, the producing, distribution, and management of keys, needful for encryption, become challenging research issues. Among them, key distribution is the most complicated because of nodes’ random deployment and poor memory space. In this paper, a novel key distribution scheme of bivariate symmetric polynomials based on sub-region is proposed for distributed WSNs. With reasonable division of sub-regions, the process of keys distribution goes on without nodes’ location information. It is extremely different from location-based or grid-based key distribution schemes. More obvious advantage is that the number of polynomials stored in each node is much less than E–G scheme and poly&&q-composite scheme. The simulation result shows our scheme far outperforms the poly&&q-composite scheme with much less energy overhead.