An Efficient Grid-Based Pairwise Key Predistribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Research on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has been receiving a lot of attention recently. Because of the constraints on the cost of hardware, there are a lot of restrictions regarding memory, computational ability, and energy consumption, hampering WSN research. So far, many key establishment schemes have been proposed for WSNs. For the proposed schemes, random key predistribution is a practical solution. With this, each sensor shares a common key with its neighbors via predistributed keys. However, it may happen that two sensor nodes do not share a common key. In this paper, an efficient grid-based pairwise key predistribution scheme for WSNs is proposed. In the proposed scheme, multiple polynomials for each row, each column, and each diagonal in the grid are constructed. Then, each sensor node in each row, column, and diagonal in the grid establishes a pairwise key with the other node using the predistributed symmetric polynomial. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in increasing the probability of establishing pairwise keys and reducing communication overhead.