A Secure and Privacy-Protecting Aggregation Scheme for Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are emerging as a practical and powerful solution to monitoring problems. However, their use in real world scenarios faces several issues. In fact, sensor nodes are tiny devices with very limited resources, and thus it is important to optimize the battery consumption. For instance, aggregation operations are widely used to minimize transmission operations, that are the most power-consuming operations for the devices. In addition, since sensor nodes operate in open and often hostile environments, security issues must be taken into account. In this paper, we propose a novel aggregation scheme which provides data integrity and privacy-protection and guarantees efficiency with respect to data transmissions, congestion, and memory overhead. To test performance of the scheme, we implemented it within a simulation software environment. We tested its performance to verify its feasibility and we evaluated the computation and power required to ensure security. Simulation results confirmed that our scheme is to be considered efficient enough to being used in real world scenarios.