An energy-efficient approach for provenance transmission in wireless sensor networks

Assessing the trustworthiness of sensor data and transmitters of this data is critical for quality assurance. Trust evaluation frameworks utilize data provenance along with the sensed data values to compute the trustworthiness of each data item. However, in a sizeable multi-hop sensor network, provenance information requires a large and variable number of bits in each packet, resulting in high energy dissipation due to the extended period of radio communication, and making trust systems unusable. We propose energy-efficient provenance encoding and construction schemes, which we refer to as Probabilistic Provenance Flow (PPF). To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to make the Probabilistic Packet Marking (PPM) approach for IP traceback feasible for sensor networks. We design two bit-efficient provenance encoding schemes along with a complementary vanilla scheme. Depending on the network size and bit budget, we select the best method using mathematical approximations and numerical analysis. Our TOSSIM simulations demonstrate that the encoding schemes of PPF have identical performance with a low bit budget (~ 32-bit), requiring 33% fewer packets and 30% less energy than PPM variants to construct provenance. With a two-fold increase in bit budget, PPF with the selected encoding scheme reduces the energy consumption by 60%¹.