Achieving Scalable Privacy Preserving Data Aggregation for Wireless Sensor Networks

A sink node must be aware of the identifications (node IDs) of those all sensor nodes which contribute in aggregated value of sensors data in order to derive exact result of them in privacy preserving data aggregation scheme for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This is possible only when if there exists such a scheme which can transmit IDs of all the participating sensor nodes to the sink node. But, currently existing TinyOS based privacy preserving data aggregation protocols for WSNs can not transmit the IDs of those all sensor nodes which contribute to aggregated value of sensor data to the sink node due to following two reasons. The first is that TinyOS offers limited payload size of 29 bytes. The second is that each sensor node ID is transmitted as a plaintext (2 bytes) to the sink node. As a result, it restricts sending IDs of all contributed sensor nodes. To resolve the problem, we, in this paper, propose a novel mechanism in which a special set of real numbers are assigned as the IDs of sensor nodes so that a single bit is sufficient to hold ID of a sensor node during transmission of aggregated data to the sink node. For this, we, first, generate fixed size signatures for the IDs of all sensor nodes and then superimpose the signatures during data aggregation phase. By analytical evaluations, we show that our scheme is more scalable and energy efficient than the existing work to transmit IDs of sensor nodes to the sink node.