Pairwise Key Establishment Scheme for Hypercube-based Wireless Sensor Networks

-When designing wireless sensor networks, the process of establishing and distributing the secret keys securely and efficiently is very challenging due to the unpredictable network topology. Recently, hypercube virtual backbone approach has been used to provide efficient data gathering schemes for the wireless sensor networks. The hypercube attractive structure and topological properties provide several disjoint paths between any two nodes which can be utilized to overcome this problem easily and efficiently, In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for pairwise key establishment for wireless sensor networks. The scheme relays on the hypercube virtual backbone and works by generating keys and distributing them securely over multiple disjoint paths which are provided by the hypercube structure. We propose an algorithm for the generation of keys and their distribution through multiple disjoint paths as well as another distributed algorithm to identify the disjoint paths within the virtual hypercube and route the keys securely and efficiently through them. Our scheme has better network resilience against node capture attack. Moreover, it provides more scalability, lower storage overhead as well as lower communication and computational overhead compared to other existing approaches. Key-Words: Pairwise Key, Wireless Sensor Networks, Virtual Backbone, Hypercube