Secret key generation in wireless sensor network using public key encryption

Abstract

In the last years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used in many applications in the real life. The sensor devices in WSNs are resource-constrained in terms of computation, energy, and memory. This makes the Key establishment and refreshment lead to increase the communication cost and consumed energy thus minimize the network lifetime in WSNs. Therefore, it is a challenging problem to design an energy efficient Secret key establishment and refreshment protocol in WSNs. In this paper, a Secret Key Generation (SKG) protocol is proposed to improve the network lifetime while maintaining the security of the WSN. SKG protocol distributes part of the secret key on the sensor nodes in the network while another part would be kept inside the nodes of the WSN. Each node in the network generates the secret keys by using the two parts. The suggested protocol is evaluated using NS2 network simulator and the conducted results show that the SKG protocol can increase throughput by the rate 17.36 b/s and decrease the consumed power for key distribution by the rate 4.3152 w thus extend the lifetime of the WSN.