SEDAN: Secure and Efficient protocol for Data Aggregation in wireless sensor Networks

Energy is a scarce resource in Wireless Sensor Networks. Some studies show that more than 70% of energy is consumed in data transmission. Since most of the time, the sensed information is redundant due to geographically collocated sensors, most of this energy can be saved through data aggregation. Furthermore, data aggregation improves bandwidth usage. Unfortunately, while aggregation eliminates redundancy, it makes data integrity verification more complicated since the received data is unique. In this paper, we present a new protocol that provides secure aggregation for wireless sensor networks. Our protocol is based on a two hops verification mechanism of data integrity. Our solution is essentially different from existing solutions in that it does not require referring to the base station for verifying and detecting faulty aggregated readings, thus providing a totally distributed scheme to guarantee data integrity. We carried out simulations using TinyOS environment. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol yields significant savings in energy consumption while preserving data integrity.