A New Efficient Key Management Protocol for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Research on sensor networks has become much more active and is currently being applied to many different fields. However since sensor networks are limited to only collecting and reporting information regarding a certain event, and requires human intervention with that given information, it is often difficult to react to an event or situation immediately and proactively. To overcome this kind of limitation, Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) with immediate-response actor nodes have been proposed which adds greater mobility and activity to the existing sensor networks. Although WSANs share many common grounds with sensor networks, it is difficult to apply existing security technologies due to the fact that WSANs contain actor nodes that are resource-independent and mobile. Therefore, this research seeks to demonstrate ways to provide security, integrity, and authentication services for WSAN's secure operation, by separating networks into hierarchical structure by each node's abilities and provides different encryption key-based secure protocols for each level of hierarchy: Pair-wise key, node key, and region key for sensor levels, and public key for actor