Key pre-distribution is an important area of research in Distributed Sensor Networks (DSN). Some improved techniques over the existing schemes (employing combinatorial designs) will be presented.

A combinatorial design followed by randomized merging strategy is applied to key pre-distribution in sensor nodes. We present detailed mathematical analysis of the number of nodes, number of keys per node and the probability that a link gets affected if certain number of nodes are compromised. Further we study the situation where properly chosen blocks are merged to form sensor nodes such that there is no intra-node common key. We present a basic heuristic for this approach and show that it provides slight improvement in terms of certain parameters than our basic random merging strategy.

Dibyendu Chakrabarti did his Masters in Computer Science from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and recently submitted his Ph.D. thesis to the same institute. He is currently a research scientist at the Media Security,Communications and Networking lab.