Key predistribution in sensor networks

Sensor networks are widely used in a variety of commercial and military applications due to their self-organization characteristics and distributed nature. As a fundamental requirement for providing security functionality in sensor networks, key predistribution plays a central role in authentication and encryption. In this paper, we describe the hexagon-based key predistribution scheme and show how it can improve the performance of key predistribution in sensor network through the use of bivariate polynomials in a hexagonal coordinate system based on the deployment information about the expected locations of the sensor nodes. More specifically, we show that the hexagon-based key scheme can improve the probability of establishing pairwise keys between sensor nodes by more than 40% over previous schemes.