An efficient top-\(k\) query processing with result integrity verification in two-tiered wireless sensor networks (Q1665956)

Summary: In two-tiered wireless sensor networks, storage nodes take charge of both storing the sensing data items and processing the query request issued by the base station. Due to their important role, storage nodes are more attractive to adversaries in a hostile environment. Once a storage node is compromised, attackers may falsify or abandon the data when answering the query issued by the base station, which will make the base station get incorrect or incomplete result. This paper proposes an efficient top-\(k\) query processing scheme with result integrity verification named as ETQ-RIV in two-tiered sensor networks. According to the basic idea that sensor nodes submit some encoded message containing the sequence relationship as proof information for verification along with their collected sensing data items, a data binding and collecting protocol and a verifiable query response protocol are proposed and described in detail. Detailed quantitative analysis and evaluation experiments show that ETQ-RIV performs better than the existing work in both communication cost and query result redundancy rate.