A key management protocol with robust continuity for sensor networks

Robust continuity should be paid much more attention in sensor network key management protocols, especially in privacy-vital environment. However, to our best of knowledge, few papers on key management have addressed the robust continuity in sensor networks. Therefore, in this paper, we present a new key management protocol with robust continuity for sensor networks. The purpose is to minimize the key management redesign effort as well as to make the node flexible and adaptable to many different applications. Compared to existing key management protocols, our proposed protocol has the following merits: First, our protocol addresses the continuity between the pairwise key and group key, it can establish the pairwise key and group key with the same pre-distributed secrets. Second, our protocol can deal with the continuity of the pairwise key and the group key themselves; it can update both of them to support the changes in the size of the network.