Secure data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

Data aggregation is a widely used technique in wireless sensor networks to reduce the power consumed in WSN. In a bid to reduce the power consumption during data gathering, cluster heads are elected to gather data from every node in the WSN. There are various challenges that are involved in the process of data aggregation like checking of duplication of data after encryption, overhead due to encryption etc. The security issues, data confidentiality and integrity in data aggregation become vital when the sensor network is deployed in a hostile environment (eg, battle field). This paper proposes a novel scheme to secure the process of data aggregation by providing a light-weight security scheme called Combinatorial Key Distribution (CKD) mechanism that consumes less power and its performance is improved using hashes of data that is sent across the network. The proposed scheme minimizes the power usage and maximizes the secureness of data in the wireless sensor network. The proposed security scheme is compared with other existing security solutions and the results are reported.