Time-slotted voting mechanism for fusion data assurance in wireless sensor networks under stealthy attacks

In wireless sensor networks, data fusion is often performed in order to reduce the overall message transmission from the sensors toward the base station. We investigate the problem of data fusion assurance in multi-level data fusion or transmission in this paper. Different to a recent approach of direct voting where the base station polls other nodes directly regarding to the received fusion result, we propose a scheme that uses the time-slotted voting technique. In this scheme, each fusion node broadcasts its fusion data or “vote” during its randomly assigned time slot. Only the fusion result with enough number of votes will be accepted. Thus, our scheme eliminates the polling process and eases the energy consumption burden on the base station or the fusion data receiver, which could well be the intermediate nodes. Our analysis and simulation results support our claim of superiority of the proposed scheme.