Energy-efficient and high-accuracy secure data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

Due to the inherent characteristics of resource-constrained sensors, communication overhead is always a major concern in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Data aggregation is an essential technique to reduce the communication overhead and prolong network lifetime. Since data aggregation results are usually used to make critical decisions, the accuracy of final aggregation results is very important. Furthermore, as wireless sensor networks are increasing being deployed in security-critical applications, we should take security into consideration as well. Therefore, for such applications, data aggregation protocols must be highly energy efficient and highly accurate while being able to prevent an adversary from stealing private data held by each sensor node. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient and high-accuracy (EEHA) scheme for secure data aggregation. The main idea of our scheme is that accurate data aggregation is achieved without releasing private sensor readings and without introducing significant overhead on the battery-limited sensors. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of EEHA. Our analysis and simulations show that EEHA is more efficient and accurate than the existing scheme. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.