Secure aggregation in hybrid mesh/sensor networks

Several researchers are proposing information systems-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that provide an extensible and effective means to monitor large and diverse geographical areas. Nodes in a WSN are characterized by very limited computing capabilities and energy consumption is a major concern, which implies that communications should be minimized, thus unorthodox solutions are required for many situations. The definition of secure and privacy aware solutions, ensuring at the same time limited power consumption of transmitted data is then a great challenge. In this paper we present an hybrid mesh/sensor network, which allows to deliver a transparent multi-hop wireless backhaul able to handle in a secure way different kinds of data (temperature, humidity, etc.), coming from different kinds of wireless sensor networks. The main idea is based on a sharing of tasks between wireless mesh networks and wireless sensor networks. Our architecture is particularly suitable to realize an application agnostic mesh backhaul able to concurrently support multiple WSNs, while ensuring both end-to-end encryption and hop-by-hop authentication. Hence, in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture an ad-hoc prototype is realized.