Edinburgh Napier University

  Researchers have come up with many high level security protocols and key management algorithms that can be applied for different types of networks. The main characteristics of wireless sensor networks that are limited computation and power made it difficult to apply these secure key management algorithms since it consumes much power and resources. Sensors in the field at different periods of time of their life time need higher level of security more than other times - sensors in a battlefield need higher security when it is war time.
In our research we developed an adaptive security protocol for two-layer clustered heterogeneous wireless sensor networks that can toggle between five different modes of operation, each with different security level. Each level of security has its own encryption/decryption algorithm and specified key length depending on the situation of the application and the situation for the wireless sensor networks.