Designing Securely and Reliably Connected Wireless Sensor Networks
This work addresses the design of securely and reliably connected sensor networks, but it is incremental as it extends existing analysis to include transmission constraints and link unreliability.
The paper tackles the problem of analyzing connectivity in wireless sensor networks using the q-composite key predistribution scheme under transmission constraints and unreliable links, deriving rigorous conditions and confirming them with numerical experiments.
In wireless sensor networks, the $q$-composite key predistribution scheme is a widely recognized way to secure communications. Although connectivity properties of secure sensor networks with the $q$-composite scheme have been studied in the literature, few results address physical transmission constraints since it is challenging to analyze the network connectivity in consideration of both the $q$-composite scheme and transmission constraints together. These transmission constraints reflect real-world implementations of sensor networks in which two sensors have to be within a certain distance from each other to communicate. In this paper, we rigorously derive conditions for connectivity in sensor networks employing the $q$-composite scheme under transmission constraints. Furthermore, we extend the analysis to consider the unreliability of wireless links by modeling each link being independently active with some probability. Our results provide useful guidelines for designing securely and reliably connected sensor networks. We also present numerical experiments to confirm the analytical results.