A Mobile Agent Based Secure Aggregation in Sensor Network

Compared with traditional wired and wireless networks, low-power wireless sensor networks (WSN) canbe rapidly deployed in a large geographical area in a self-configured manner. In such types of networks dataaggregation is a key issue. Hop-by-hop data aggregation in this regard is a very important technique for reducing thecommunication overhead and energy expenditure of sensor nodes during the process of data collection in a sensornetwork. However, because individual sensor readings are lost in the per-hop aggregation process, compromisednodes in the network may forge false values as the aggregation results of other nodes, resulting the base station intoaccepting wrong aggregation results. Here a fundamental challenge is how the base station can obtain a goodapproximation of the aggregated data when a group of sensor nodes are compromised. In this paper, we havedesigned and implemented a prototype for secure data aggregation using mobile agent (MA) technology. The keyadvantage of using MA is their capability to move in heterogeneous networks without consuming many resources. The designed scheme uses a novel probabilistic grouping technique to dynamically partition the nodes in a treetopology into multiple logical levels of similar sizes. A commitment-based hop-by-hop aggregation is performed byMA in each group to generate a group aggregate. Extensive analysis and simulations show that designed scheme canachieve the level of efficiency close to an ordinary hop-by-hop aggregation protocol while providing high assuranceon the trustworthiness of the aggregation result. The prototype implementation on top of TinyOS shows thatdesigned scheme is practical on current sensor nodes such as Mica2 motes