Watermarking-based intellectual property protection for sensor streaming data

Watermarking is an efficient solution especially in the application of Intellectual Property (IP) in public security and military area. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, named Time Varying Watermarking Algorithm (TVWA), for streaming data copyright protection. By adjusting the sequence of data in every packet and keeping the value of the data unchanged, we embed the watermark into streaming data. We apply TVWA on a prototype system, which is developed with TinyOS motes. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is simple but of great efficiency. We can accurately extract the embedded watermark in the real-time mode. We can also verify the IP of the data by only detecting the segment of data in the off-line mode.