An efficient data aggregation protocol concentrated on data integrity in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of a great number of sensor nodes with strictly limited computation capability, storage, communication resources, and battery power. Because they are deployed in remote and hostile environments and hence are vulnerable to physical attacks, sensor networks face many practical challenges. Data confidentiality, data integrity, source authentication, and availability are all major security concerns. In this paper, we focus on the very problem of preserving data integrity and propose an Efficient Integrity-Preserving Data Aggregation Protocol (EIPDAP) to guarantee the integrity of aggregation result through aggregation in sensor networks. In EIPDAP, base station can immediately verify the integrity of aggregation result after receiving the aggregation result and corresponding authentication information. However, to check integrity, most existing protocols need an additional phase which will consume a lot of energy and cause network delay. Compared with other related schemes, EIPDAP reduces the communication overhead per node to O (Δ), where Δ is the degree of the aggregation tree for the network. To the best of our knowledge, EIPDAP has the most optimal upper bound on solving the integrity-preserving data aggregation problem.