A Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Hop-by-Hop Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data aggregation is a vital technique in resource-limited wireless sensor networks (WSNs), improving energy efficiency as sensor nodes combine data on its way towards the base station, minimizing the number of data packets that needs to be transmitted. In order to preserve the privacy of aggregated data from compromises, many secure data aggregation (SDA) protocols have been developed. However, the implementation of these protocols increase the computational cost of data aggregation. Performing, thus data aggregation in a secure manner in resource-limited WSNs is a challenging task. To preserve privacy and reduce the computational cost of data aggregation, this paper proposes a novel and lightweight privacy-preserving hop-by-hop data aggregation (PHDA) scheme for WSNs. Unlike other SDA schemes, our scheme employs only hash operations which is computationally inexpensive. In addition to preserving privacy, our scheme protects data integrity and achieves message authentication. Security analysis shows that our scheme complies with the security requirements of WSNs and performance evaluation demonstrates that, PHDA is computationally more efficient than state-of-the-art schemes.