Privacy-preserving robust data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

In-network data aggregation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a technique aimed at reducing the communication overhead-sensed data are combined into partial results at intermediate nodes during message routing. However, in the above technique, some sensor nodes need to send their individual sensed values to an aggregator node, empowered with the capability to decrypt the received data to perform a partial aggregation. This scenario raises privacy concerns in applications like personal health care and the military surveillance. A few other solutions exist where the data are not disclosed to the aggregator (e.g., using privacy homomorphism (PH)), but these solutions are not robust to node or communication failure. The contributions of this paper are two-fold: first, we design a private data aggregation protocol that does not leak individual sensed values during the data aggregation process. In particular, neither the base station (BS) nor the other nodes are able to compromise the privacy of an individual node's sensed value. Second, the proposed protocol is robust to data-loss; if there is a node-failure or communication failure, the protocol is still able to compute the aggregate and to report to the base station the number of nodes that participated in the aggregation. To the best of our knowledge, our scheme is the first one that efficiently addresses the above issues all at once. Copyright c (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.