A Survey on Key Management Strategies for Different Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have proved to be useful in applications that involve monitoring of real-time data. There is a wide variety of monitoring applications that can employ Wireless Sensor Network. Characteristics of a WSN, such as topology and scale, depend upon the application, for which it is employed. Security requirements in WSN vary according to the application dependent network characteristics and the characteristics of an application itself. Key management is the most important aspect of security as some other security modules depend on it. We discuss application dependent variations in WSN, corresponding changes in the security requirements of WSN and the applicability of existing key management solutions in each scenario.