Combinatorics and Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are collections of low power devices which can communicate wirelessly, produce data (from an onboard sensor, say) and engage in limited computation. Such networks of devices have many applications, for example: to wildlife monitoring, disaster recovery, warehouse security and military situations.This proposal aims to develop the mathematics associated with securing wireless sensor networks. In particular, we will study the mathematics of distributing secret keying material amongst the nodes in a network ('key pre-distribution') in order to more accurately model well known schemes and in order to provide improvements on these schemes. We will also investigate ways of managing keys post-deployment, to prevent the security of the network being compromised by the loss of nodes or by the capture of nodes and the discovery of the keying material they posess.