A New Private Data Aggregation Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications require privacy of the sampled data during transmission from the source nodes to a data collecting device, say a query server. Providing an efficient data aggregation scheme with preserving data privacy is a challenging problem in WSNs. Although the secure data aggregation in WSNs has been well studied in the recent years, there exists a little work, for instance PDA (Privacy-preserving Data Aggregation), which focuses on protecting sensor data not only from adversaries but also from the participating trusted sensor nodes. However, PDA suffers from two problems. The first one is high communication cost due to unnecessary traffics in the network during data transmissions. The second one is high computation cost due to the use of expensive technique to customize sensor data. To resolve the problems, we, in this paper, propose a new private data aggregation scheme for WSNs. The proposed scheme applies the additive property of complex numbers in order to combine sensor data and preserve data privacy during transmissions to the query server. We show from our analytical performance evaluations that our scheme is more efficient than the PDA scheme in terms of both communication and computation costs.