Secure data aggregation with fault tolerance for Wireless Sensor Networks

The reliability of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is affected by faults that may occur due to various reasons such as communication link failure, malfunctioning hardware, software glitches, dislocation or environmental hazards. A WSN that is not prepared to deal with such situations may suffer from a reduction in network lifetime or lead to hazardous consequences in critical application contexts. One of the major fault recovery techniques is the exploitation of redundancy, which is often a default condition in WSNs. In this paper, we propose a scheme called Secure Data Aggregation with Fault Tolerance for Wireless Sensor Networks which provides both end to end confidentiality and fault tolerance during data aggregation. Here, we propose to use shared cryptography to secure message communication in a sensor network. In this approach we divide the information into multiple shares and transmit the different shares via multiple disjoint paths between any pair of communicating nodes. At the receiving end the original information is reconstructed by combining the shares received via different paths. We have also proposed to keep redundancy in the number of shares to withstand loss of some shares due to message loss during transmission. So proposed scheme works correctly in the event of communication link failure.