Secured Data Gathering Protocol for IoT Networks

Data collection in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and specifically in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks draws significant attention both by the industrial and academic communities. Numerous Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for WSN have been suggested over the years, designed to cope with a variety of setups and objectives. However, most IoT devices are only required to exchange very little information (typically one out of several predetermined messages), and do so only sporadically. Furthermore, only a small subset (which is not necessarily known a priori) intends to transmit at any given time. Accordingly, a tailored protocol is much more suited than the existing general purpose WSN protocols. In many IoT applications securing the data transmitted and the identity of the transmitting devices is critical. However, security in such IoT networks is highly challenging since the devices are typically very simple, with highly constrained capabilities, e.g., limited memory and computational power or no sophisticated algorithmic capabilities, which make the utilization of complex cryptographic primitives unfeasible. Furthermore, note that in many such applications, securing the information transmitted is not sufficient, since knowing the transmitters identity conveys a lot of information (e.g., the identity of a hazard detector conveys the information that a threat was detected).