A real-time dynamic key management for hierarchical wireless multimedia sensor network

With the recent fast growth in the electronics industry and potential customers, communication managements in interactive Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) are increasingly ubiquitous, such as retrieving images, audio streams, video streams, and scalar sensor data, etc. However, due to restricted resources and operation in a hostile environment, WMSNs are usually subjected to numerous threats and vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, we present a Real-time Dynamic Key Management (RDKM), a splay tree-based rekey management, which can efficiently enhance the network security and survivability in the LEACH-like protocol. Compared to other LEACH-like security solutions, our work offers some salient advantages. First, it establishes a real-time rekey mechanism based on the access-triggered splay tree architecture. In the mechanism, the keys will be changed during messages exchanging phase. To the best of our knowledge, RDKM is the first real-time key management for security in WMSNs. Second, it designs and realizes the rekey mechanism based on the splay tree, which can provide dynamic architecture to generate new keys and make the dynamic key management feasible without any overhead. The novel mechanism can efficiently protect the network against attacks from eavesdropping or captured nodes compromise and address challenging security issues of runtime in WMSNs. Experimental analysis shows that our solution has high security levels as well as good performance.