Non-Manipulable Aggregator Node Election Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Aggregator nodes commonly have the ability to read, corrupt or disrupt the flow of information produced by a wireless sensor network (WSN). Despite this fact, existing aggregator node election schemes do not address an adversary that strives to influence the election process towards candidate nodes that it controls. We discuss the requirements that need to be fulfilled by a non-manipulable aggregator node election protocol. We conclude that these requirements can be satisfied by a distributed random number generator function in which no node is able to determine the output of the function. We provide and compare three protocols that instantiate such function.