Abstract
Self-healing group key distribution is a primitive aimed to achieve robust key distribution in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) over lossy communication channels. However, all the existing self-healing group key distribution schemes in the literature are designed for homogenous WSNs that do not scale. In contract, heterogeneous WSNs have better scalability and performance. We are thus motivated to study self-healing group key distribution for heterogeneous WSNs. In particular, we propose the concept of hierarchical self-healing group key distribution, tailored to the heterogeneous WSN architecture; we further revisit and adapt Dutta et al.’s model to the setting of hierarchical self-healing group key distribution, and propose concrete schemes that achieve computational security and high efficiency.