Secure and efficient key management protocol for WSNs based on trust clustering algorithm

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are deployed in open and even hostile environment where they are vulnerable to exterior and interior attacks. Most of the previous key management protocols mainly focus on the exterior attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel key management protocol based on trust clustering algorithm (KMTC) to deal with not only exterior attacks but also interior ones. Furthermore, KMTC is of high scalability in terms of nodes joining and leaving the network. Analysis shows that KMTC can carry out secure communication by dealing with the two kinds of attacks. The simulation results present that it can enhance the life cycle due to its effective utilization of resource.