Compact Provenance Scheme Through Packet Path Index Differences in WSNs

In a wireless sensor network (WSN), provenance, usually considered as the tracebacks of the data packets’ acquisition and transmission, is critical for assessing data trustworthiness. However, the provenance size expands rapidly with increases in the number of packet transmission hops. Among the known provenance schemes, the dictionary based provenance (DP) scheme achieves the highest provenance compression rate up to now. Nevertheless, the average compression rate of the DP scheme decreases drastically when the WSN’s topology is not stable. To address such a disadvantage, in this paper we propose a packet path index differences based provenance (PIDP) scheme. In the PIDP scheme, the backbone paths along the gradient directions of the packet transmissions are built, and then the provenance is encoded by a selected index of a backbone path dictionaries together with a deviation from the backbone path. To further increase the provenance compression rate and decrease the computation complexity at each node, a packet path hash value based provenance (PHP) scheme is proposed as a complementary approach of the PIDP scheme, in which the provenance is encoded as the data source node ID together with a segment of the packet path’s hash value. Both the simulation and experimental results show that our proposed two schemes, the PIDP and the PHP schemes, outperform the DP scheme with respect to both provenance compression rate and energy conservation rate even when a WSN’s topology is not stable.