Significant Storage on Sensor Storage Space, Energy Consumption and Better Security Based on Routing in Hybrid Sensor Networks

WSNs are characterized by limited resources in terms of communication, computation and energy supply.A critical constraint on sensors networks is that sensor nodes employ batteries. A second constraint is thatsensors will be deployed unattended and in large numbers, so that it will be difficult to change or rechargebatteries in the sensors .The Energy Consumption in wireless sensor networks varies greatly based on theprotocols the sensors use and computations used to generate keys for communication among neighbornodes. Previous research on sensor network security mainly considers homogeneous sensor networks,where all sensor nodes have the same capabilities. Research has shown that homogeneous ad hoc networkshave poor performance and scalability. The many-to-one traffic pattern dominates in sensor networks, andhence a sensor may only communicate with a small portion of its neighbors. Key Management is afundamental security operation. Most existing key management schemes try to establish shared keys for allpairs of neighbor sensors, no matter whether these nodes communicate with each other or not, and thiscauses large overhead and more energy consumption and more storage requirement. In this paper, weadopt a Hybrid Sensor Network (HSN) model for better performance and security. We propose a novelrouting-driven key establishment scheme, which only establishes shared keys for neighbor sensors thatcommunicate with each other. We utilize Elliptic Curve Cryptography in the design of an efficient keyEstablishment scheme for sensor nodes. The performance evaluation and security analysis show that ourkey Establishment scheme can provide better security with significant reductions on communicationoverhead, storage space and energy consumption than other key Establishment schemes.