Abstract—Ubiquitous computing environments find their practical implementations through wireless sensor networks, which sense a relationship among themselves and the environment. Presently devised key management schemes are classified namely for homogeneous environments, or heterogeneous environments. In this paper, we propose a deployment conscious security framework supporting, a shift of complex operations to more capable nodes of heterogeneous environment and relieving resource constrained generic sensor nodes of major activities. We introduced a concept of deployment knowledge independent group key generation using a special kind of heterogeneitymultilevel transmission. Performance of proposed key management schemes is evaluated across relevant matrices and concluded to be satisfactory. Findings show that asymmetric key cryptography is comparatively more demanding in resources than symmetric version but ensures maximum security. Through our work we able to conclude that a hybrid of asymmetric and symmetric key cryptography best suits heterogeneous environments.

Index Terms—heterogeneous, asymmetric keys, wireless sensor networks  

Cite: Kamal Kumar, A. K. Verma, and R. B. Patel, "Framework for Key Management Scheme in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks," Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 286-296, November 2011. doi:10.4304/jetwi.3.4.286-296