A Review of Recent Developments about Secure Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

The security issue of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is very prominent since WSNs are often deployed in an open and even hostile environment. Data are vulnerable to attack in the process of data aggregation. Consequently, the design of secure data aggregation protocols is one of the most important issues in WSNs. The secure data aggregation in WSNs faces many challenges due to its intrinsic properties. Aiming to provide a review of recent developments about secure data aggregation in WSNs, this paper first analyzed the typical security schemes of data aggregation in recent years, with views from data confidentiality and data integrity. Then this paper further compares and summarizes different secure data aggregation schemes based on the key technique utilized and the performance (e.g., communication cost, computation cost, accuracy, delay, attacks resisted, etc.) achieved. Open research issues about secure data aggregation in WSNs are also presented. We hope this work can provide a guidance for researchers who are interested in exploring secure data aggregation in WSNs.