A beneficial analysis of deployment knowledge for key distribution in wireless sensor networks

Because of the resource constraints on sensor networks, many recent key management schemes exploit the location of nodes in order to establish pairwise keys. Despite these efforts, location discovery for sensor networks is very difficult because existing schemes have failed to consider changes in the signal range and the deployment error. As a result, network performance may accidentally decrease, whereas costs increase. In this paper, we used the theory of the signal range and deployment error knowledge to analyze sensor nodes location information. Combining with the probabilistic pre-distribution method, we proposed a scheme that provides high connectivity and secure communication with better communication overhead by defining an efficient number of adjacent cells and determining the adequate length of the cell. With such optimistic results, novel deployment knowledge is also expected to provide superior performance with different types of key distribution schemes. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.