ID list forwarding free confidentiality preserving data aggregation for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are composed of sensor nodes with limited energy which is difficult to replenish. Data aggregation is considered to help reduce communication overhead with in-network processing, thus minimizing energy consumption and maximizing network lifetime. Meanwhile, it comes with challenges for data confidentiality protection. Many existing confidentiality preserving aggregation protocols have to transfer list of sensors' ID for base station to explicitly tell which sensor nodes have actually provided measurement. However, forwarding a large number of node IDs brings overwhelming extra communication overhead. In this paper, we propose provably secure aggregation scheme perturbation-based efficient confidentiality preserving protocol (PEC2P) that allows efficient aggregation of perturbed data without transferring any ID information. In general, environmental data is confined to a certain range; hence, we utilize this feature and design an algorithm to help powerful base station retrieve the ID of reporting nodes. We analyze the accuracy of PEC2P and conclude that base station can retrieve the sum of environmental data with an overwhelming probability. We also prove that PEC2P is CPA secure by security reduction. Experiment results demonstrate that PEC2P significantly reduces node congestion (especially for the root node) during aggregation process in comparison with the existing protocols.