Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks: From the Perspective of Security

Abstract

Nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually deployed in an unattended even hostile environment. What is worse, these nodes are equipped with limited battery, storage, computation, and communication resources. Therefore, it is challenging to ensure the security of a WSN without decreasing its network performance. Data aggregation (DA) combined with a security mechanism can provide a good scheme for solving the aforementioned problems. This article presents a comprehensive review of secure DA (SDA) in WSNs, including its security goals together with the existing problems. The traditional network topologies as well as new emerging ones are discussed and compared in order to indicate the application scenes and security levels of different topologies. Meanwhile, the contrastive analyses of security strategies are presented which divides SDA protocols into five categories according to different security mechanisms, security goals, and network topologies. Besides, the discussion points out some open issues which may be the valuable topics of SDA in the future.