Hierarchical Approach to Secure Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

The main objective of this paper is to aggregate the data in a secure way such that the tampering caused by the adversaries can be avoided and these secure authentication mechanisms ensure that the base station does not accept forged aggregation value. Previous data aggregation schemes make sure that base stations do not receive and agree with the false aggregation values. The authentication mechanisms are used to detect malicious nodes. But these mechanisms may not be efficient and they can be easily bypassed by hacking the keys used for encryption. A secure mechanism for aggregating the data has been put forward in which the two stages of verification are performed. In the first stage, Level based scheme is applied as the verification technique at each level. In this scheme, the keys are updated dynamically which enhances the security. Next stage of verification is the encryption of the packets by using its private key. The proposed secure data aggregation mechanism improves the performance and efficiency of the aggregation process. Analysis of experimental results indicates that the performance of the proposed scheme is twice that of the previous schemes.