Packet-level attestation (PLA): A framework for in-network sensor data reliability

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) show enormous potential for collection and analysis of physical data in real-time. Many papers have proposed methods for improving the network reliability of WSNs. However, real WSN deployments show that sensor data-faults are very common. Several server-side data reliability techniques have been proposed to detect these faults and impute missing or erroneous data. Typically, these techniques reduce the lifetime of the network due to redundant data transmission, increase latency, and are computation and storage intensive. Herein, we propose Packet-Level Attestation (PLA), a novel framework for sensor data reliability assessment. It exploits the spatial correlation of data sensed at nearby sensors. The method does not incur additional transmission of control message between source and sink; instead, a verifier node sends a validation certificate as part of the regular data packet. PLA was implemented in TinyOS on TelosB motes and its performances was assessed. Simulations were performed to determine its scalability. It incurs only an overhead of 1.45% in terms of packets transmitted. Fault detection precision of the framework varied from 100% to 99.48%. Comparisons with existing methods for data reliability analysis showed a significant reduction in data transmission, prolonging the network lifetime.