Secure data aggregation in wireless sensor networks: A comprehensive overview

Wireless sensor networks often consists of a large number of low-cost sensor nodes that have strictly limited sensing, computation, and communication capabilities. Due to resource restricted sensor nodes, it is important to minimize the amount of data transmission so that the average sensor lifetime and the overall bandwidth utilization are improved. Data aggregation is the process of summarizing and combining sensor data in order to reduce the amount of data transmission in the network. As wireless sensor networks are usually deployed in remote and hostile environments to transmit sensitive information, sensor nodes are prone to node compromise attacks and security issues such as data confidentiality and integrity are extremely important. Hence, wireless sensor network protocols, e.g., data aggregation protocol, must be designed with security in mind. This paper investigates the relationship between security and data aggregation process in wireless sensor networks. A taxonomy of secure data aggregation protocols is given by surveying the current "state-of-the-art" work in this area. In addition, based on the existing research, the open research areas and future research directions in secure data aggregation concept are provided. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.