A Signature-Based Data Security Technique for Energy-Efficient Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data aggregation techniques have been widely used in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to solve the energy constraint problems of sensor nodes. They can conserve the significant amount of energy by reducing data packet transmission costs. However, many data aggregation applications require privacy and integrity protection of the real data while transmitting data from the sensing nodes to a sink node. The existing schemes for supporting both privacy and integrity, that is, iCDPA, and iPDA, suffer from high communication cost, high computation cost, and data propagation delay. To resolve the problems, we propose a signature-based data security technique for protecting sensitive data aggregation in WSNs. To support privacy-preserving data aggregation and integrity checking, our technique makes use of the additive property of complex numbers. Out of two parts of a complex number, the real part is used to hide the sampled data of a sensor node from its neighboring nodes and adversaries, whereas the imaginary part is used for data integrity checking at both data aggregators and the sink node. Through a performance analysis, we prove that our privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme outperforms the existing schemes up to 50% in terms of communication and computation overheads as well as up to 3 times in terms of integrity checking and data propagation delay. 1. Introduction Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely studied in ubiquitous computing environment. The WSNs can be applied to various types of applications, such as environment management and military monitoring [1–4]. However, the sensor nodes that form WSNs have resource constraints such as limited power, slow processor, and less memory. For these reasons, it is essential to improve the energy efficiency of sensor nodes (or WSN) in order to enhance the quality of application service [5–10]. The first issue of WSNs is to reduce energy consumption in WSNs. Because the amount of energy consumption for communication is the greatest, it is important to reduce communication overhead. For reducing communication cost, transmitting the required and partially processed data is more meaningful than sending a large amount of raw data. In general, sending raw data causes the energy consumption of sensor nodes because duplicated messages are sent to the same node, called implosion, as well as neighboring nodes receive the duplicated messages if two nodes share the same observing region, called overlapping. In recent years, data aggregation has been actively used to combine data coming from many sensor