Performance evaluation of key distribution methods for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks usually consist of a large number of small devices that are called sensor node. Each device is battery powered and equipped with integrated sensors, a data processing unit, and a short-range radio communication unit. Sensor nodes are significantly constrained in terms of energy, memory, and computational capacity. Wireless sensor networks are being deployed in wide variety of applications, including military sensing and tracking, environment monitoring, patient monitoring, smart environments. When a wireless sensor network is deployed in a hostile environment, security becomes an extremely important issue. Confidentiality, authenticity, availability, and integrity are typical security goals for wireless sensor networks. Providing these goals to secure communication among sensor nodes typically depends on the employment of cryptographic schemes which always require a key management service. In this thesis, key distribution methods of wireless sensor networks are investigated and a classification for these key distribution methods is proposed. In addition, performance evaluation of the analyzed key distribution schemes in terms of secure connectivity, memory overhead, communication overhead, time and resilience against node capture is presented.