Energy evaluation of data aggregation and authentication protocol (DAA) in wireless sensor networks

While security is an important feature in wireless sensor networks, but the energy constraints of sensor nodes should also be considered. In this work, the energy expenditure of such authentication protocol has been investigated respect to TelosB energy consumption behavior. Data Aggregation and Authentication protocol (DAA) integrates false data detection with data aggregation and confidentiality. DAA computes several Message Authentication Codes (MACs) and performs data aggregation along the path. Furthermore, integrity verification is carried out from source to destination. To evaluate precisely the energy efficiency of the scheme in the real world, a test bed implementation of DAA protocol is compared in terms of energy consumption with another authentication protocol. It is shown when the network is under attack and the amount of false data is high, DAA greatly outperforms traditional authentication techniques.