An Integer Programming Formulation of the Key Management Problem in Wireless Sensor Networks
  With the advent of modern communications systems, much attention has been put
on developing methods for securely transferring information between
constituents of wireless sensor networks. To this effect, we introduce a
mathematical programming formulation for the key management problem, which
broadly serves as a mechanism for encrypting communications. In particular, an
integer programming model of the q-Composite scheme is proposed and utilized to
distribute keys among nodes of a network whose topology is known. Numerical
experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed model are conducted
using using a well-known optimization solver package. An illustrative example
depicting an optimal encryption for a small-scale network is also presented.
