Secure K-Nearest neighbor queries in two-tiered mobile wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Tiered Mobile Wireless Sensor Network(TMWSN) is a new paradigm introduced by mobile edge computing. Now it has received wide attention because of its high scalability, robustness, deployment flexibility, and it has a wide range of application scenarios. In TMWSNs, the storage nodes are the key nodes of the network and are more easily captured and utilized by attackers. Once the storage nodes are captured by the attackers, the data stored on them will be exposed. Moreover, the query process and results will not be trusted any more. This paper mainly studies the secure KNN query technology in TMWSNs, and we propose a secure KNN query algorithm named the Basic Algorithm For Secure KNN Query(BAFSKQ) first, which can protect privacy and verify the integrity of query results. However, this algorithm has a large communication overhead in most cases. In order to solve this problem, we propose an improved algorithm named the Secure KNN Query Algorithm Based on MR-Tree(SEKQAM). The MR-Trees are used to find the K-nearest locations and help to generate a verification set to process the verification of query results. It can be proved that our algorithms can effectively guarantee the privacy of the data stored on the storage nodes and the integrity of the query results. Our experimental results also show that after introducing the MR-Trees in KNN queries on TMWSNs, the communication overhead has an effective reduction compared to BAFSKQ.