Efficient pairwise key establishment scheme based on random pre-distribution keys in WSN

Key establishment and management are the cores of many security mechanisms and services in wireless sensor networks which are commonly deployed in a hostile environment. Pre-distributing keys into sensor nodes is a practical option for key management in wireless sensor environment. The negotiation and establishment of pairwise keys are much more important after the nodes are deployed, so that the whole network will work in expectation and safely. In this paper, we proposed an efficient pairwise key establishment scheme used in cluster-based random key pre-distribution protocol, which can provide perfect connectivity and security for large scale wireless sensor networks. Simulation results and performance analysis indicates that it also has other strongpoint, lower communication and computational overhead, much more scalable and flexible for the network size, a better balance between the node storage capacity and communication overhead.