Copyright © 2010 Yanfei Zheng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Data aggregation is an essential operation to reduce energy consumption in large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A compromised node may forge an aggregation result and mislead base station into trusting a false reading. Efficient and secure aggregation scheme is critical in WSN applications due to the stringent resource constraints. In this paper, we propose a method to build up the representative-based aggregation tree in the WSNs such that the sensing data are aggregated along the route from the leaf cell to the root of the tree. In the cinema of large-scale and high-density sensor nodes, representative-based aggregation tree can reduce the data transmission overhead greatly by directed aggregation and cell-by-cell communications. It also provides security services including the integrity, freshness, and authentication, via detection mechanism in the cells.