Stepwise Refinement Provenance Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), provenance is critical for assessing the trustworthiness of the data acquired and forwarded by sensor nodes. Due to the energy and bandwidth limitations of WSNs, it is crucial that data provenance should be as compact as possible. The main drawback of the existing block provenance schemes is that to decode the provenance, all of the provenance blocks must be received by the base station (BS) correctly. To address such an issue, we propose a multigranularity graphs-based stepwise refinement provenance scheme (MSRP), among which we use the mutual information between node pair as the similarity index to classify node IDs and then generate the multigranularity topology graphs. Furthermore, the dictionary-based provenance scheme (DP) is employed to encode the provenance in a stepwise manner. The BS recovers the provenance in the same stepwise manner and performs the data trustworthiness evaluation during the decoding. We evaluate the performance of the MSRP scheme extensively by both simulations and testbed experiments. In addition to mitigating the main drawback of the existing block provenance schemes, the results show that our scheme not only outperforms the known related schemes with respect to average provenance size and energy consumption but also drastically improves data trustworthiness assessing efficiency.