A witness-based approach for data fusion assurance in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes are spread randomly over the coverage area to collect information of interest. Data fusion is used to process these collected information before they are sent to the base station, the observer of the sensor network. We study the security of the data fusion process in this work. In particular, we propose a witness-based solution to assure the validation of the data sent from data fusion nodes to the base station. We also present the theoretical analysis for the overhead associated with the mechanism, which indicates that even in an extremely harsh environment the overhead is low for the proposed mechanism.