Topological Key Hierarchy for Energy-Efficient Group Key Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

A sensor network operating in open environments requires a network-wide group key for confidentiality of exchanged messages between sensor nodes. When a node behaves abnormally due to its malfunction or a compromise attack by adversaries, the central sink node should update the group key of other nodes. The major concern of this group key update procedure will be the multi-hop communication overheads of the rekeying messages due to the energy constraints of sensor nodes. Many researchers have tried to reduce the number of rekeying messages by using the logical key tree. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient group key management scheme called Topological Key Hierarchy (TKH). TKH generates a key tree by using the underlying sensor network topology with consideration of subtree-based key tree separation and wireless multicast advantage. Based on our detailed analysis and simulation study, we compare the total rekeying costs of our scheme with the previous logical key tree schemes and demonstrate its energy efficiency.