An efficient decentralized rekeying scheme to secure hierarchical geographic multicast routing in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks consist of several autonomous sensors deployed in a distributed fashion for different purposes like that of wildlife tracing, detection of intruders, environment monitoring etc. Efficient multicast is necessary to scale down the exchange of messages for group communication in sensor networks. However incorporating security in wireless sensor group communication is a huge challenge because of the limited resource availability. In this paper, a decentralized rekeying mechanism based on Logical Key Hierarchy is proposed to secure the efficient Hierarchical Geographic Multicast Routing without affecting its actual performance. The proposed protocol, Secure Hierarchical Geographic Multicast Routing (SHGMR) meets all the security requirements necessary for any kind of secure group communication. This protocol is also efficient in terms of scalability as it uses only O(log2nmax) message transmissions, where nmax is the size of the largest subgroup among all the HGMR cells.