Scalability in Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a new privacy preserving data aggregation scheme for WSNs. Our scheme applies additive property of complex numbers in order to combine sensor data and preserve data privacy during transmission to the sink node. In addition, for supporting scalability, we propose a novel mechanism in which a special set of real numbers are assigned to sensor nodes as their IDs 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 methods to achieve data privacy and transmit IDs of sensor nodes along with the aggregated data to the sink node.