PRDA: polynomial regression-based privacy-preserving data aggregation for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, data aggregation protocols are used to prolong the network lifetime. However, the problem of how to perform data aggregation while preserving data privacy is challenging. This paper presents a polynomial regression-based data aggregation protocol that preserves the privacy of sensor data. In the proposed protocol, sensor nodes represent their data as polynomial functions to reduce the amount of data transmission. In order to protect data privacy, sensor nodes secretly send coefficients of the polynomial functions to data aggregators instead of their original data. Data aggregation is performed on the basis of the concealed polynomial coefficients, and the base station is able to extract a good approximation of the network data from the aggregation result. The security analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme is able to reduce the amount of data transmission in the network while preserving data privacy. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.