A Reliable, Energy-Efficient And Secure Data Aggregation Framework For Resource-Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are ubiquitous to continuous sensing and remote monitoring applications, where a multitude of resource-limited sensor nodes collect and send environmental data to a base station. With so many sensor nodes placed in close proximity to each other, the collected data may have high spatial and temporal correlation that can lead to unnecessary data transmission, high energy consumption, packet collisions, communication delay, and short network lifetime. While current aggregation schemes often tackle energy saving, data reliability, scheduling, and security as separate issues, data aggregation is a good way to reduce unwanted transmissions. This makes it unsuitable to use in resource constrained WSNs, where these requirements are tightly coupled. In this paper, we propose a framework named Adaptive Reliability-Aware Secure Data Aggregation (ARSDA) which incorporates data filtering, reliability assessment, energy-aware forwarding, as well as secure aggregation. First, abnormal observations in the sensors are detected by the Exponential Moving Average (EMA) with adaptive threshold, which also filters out redundant observations. The sensor observations are then aggregated based on similarity. Based on the residual energy, data reliability, similarity quality and transmission distance, a reliability-energy score is used to select the appropriate forwarding nodes. To maintain the confidentiality and integrity of the information transmitted, while keeping security related overhead to a minimum, secure aggregation is provided. Evaluation using network, aggregation, reliability, and security measures for simulation based on ARSDA, LEACH, and RSDA. The proposed ARSDA shows 98.2% data accuracy, 1780 round of network lifetime, 1.9% packet loss ratio and 98.1% packet delivery ratio. Results show that a combination of reliability-aware aggregation with energy-aware forwarding and light-weight security scheme is actually feasible for prolonging the WSN life with reliable and secure data delivery.