  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.
