A survey of key management schemes in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have many applications, vary in size, and are deployed in a wide variety of areas. They are often deployed in potentially adverse or even hostile environment so that there are concerns on security issues in these networks. Sensor nodes used to form these networks are resource-constrained, which make security applications a challenging problem. Efficient key distribution and management mechanisms are needed besides lightweight ciphers. Many key establishment techniques have been designed to address the tradeoff between limited memory and security, but which scheme is the most effective is still debatable. In this paper, we provide a survey of key management schemes in wireless sensor networks. We notice that no key distribution technique is ideal to all the scenarios where sensor networks are used; therefore the techniques employed must depend upon the requirements of target applications and resources of each individual sensor network.