Efficient data aggregation with in-network integrity control for WSN

Energy is a scarce resource in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Some studies show that more than 70% of energy is consumed in data transmission in WSN. Since most of the time, the sensed information is redundant due to geographically collocated sensors, most of this energy can be saved through data aggregation. Furthermore, data aggregation improves bandwidth usage and reduces collisions due to interference. Unfortunately, while aggregation eliminates redundancy, it makes data integrity verification more complicated since the received data is unique. In this paper, we present a new protocol that provides control integrity for aggregation in wireless sensor networks. Our protocol is based on a two-hop verification mechanism of data integrity. Our solution is essentially different from existing solutions in that it does not require referring to the base station for verifying and detecting faulty aggregated readings, thus providing a totally distributed scheme to guarantee data integrity. We carried out numerical analysis and simulations using the TinyOS environment. Results show that the proposed protocol yields significant savings in energy consumption while preserving data integrity, and outperforms comparable solutions with respect to some important performance criteria. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.