Analytic hierarchy process aided key management schemes evaluation in wireless sensor network

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in various applications. Since their sensor nodes are resource-constrained and their security primitives need to store a set of security credentials to share a secure channel, key management is one of the most challenging issues in the design of WSN. Currently, various efficient lightweight key management schemes (KMs) have been proposed to enable encryption and authentication in WSN for different application scenarios. According to different requirements, it is important to select the trustworthy key management schemes in a WSN for setting up a fully trusted WSN mechanism. In this context, adaptive methods are required to evaluate those schemes. In this paper, we exploit Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to help with the complex decision. Specifically, we consider the following performance criteria: scalability, key connectivity, resilience, storage overhead, processing overhead and communication overhead. Two case studies are added for verifying our proposal. Via the two case studies, it is verified that our method is able to help selecting a suitable scheme for given requirements.