LNT: a Logical Neighbor Tree for Secure Group Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

ecure group management is an important issue in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The most of previous works consider the whole network as a single group managed by a central, powerful node (e.g., the base station) capable of supporting heavy communication, computation and storage cost. However, typical WSNs applications may benefit from being designed and implemented as a collection of multiple logical groups, each one is maintained by a sensor node (the group controller) with constrained resources. Furthermore, previous schemes require multicast support at the routing level to deliver rekeying messages. Unfortunately, multicast may cause a storage and communication overhead that are not a_ordable in a WSN. In order to go beyond these two limitations, we propose a new secure group management scheme with a lightweight re-keying process. The scheme allows multiple logical groups, each one is maintained and rekeyed separately by a resource-constrained sensor node without requiring multicast routing support. We prove that the scheme is secure and we evaluate its performance from several view points. Actually, we show that our scheme outperforms some previous well-known schemes such as LKH