Edge-Enabled: A Scalable and Decentralized Data Aggregation Scheme for IoT

The data aggregation technique has been widely adopted in the Internet of Things (IoT) to protect data privacy while ensuring data availability. Homomorphic encryption is a typical technique that guarantees accurate computing results. However, it brings heavy computation overhead for edge nodes and exposes the aggregated results to the central server, which significantly threatens the confidentiality of results. This article gets rid of the server-centric style existing in most data aggregation schemes and proposes a scalable and decentralized data aggregation scheme for edge-enabled IoT. In the proposed scheme, edge nodes can freely form, join, and exit from the data aggregation group to aggregate data correctly, securely, and efficiently. Besides, two structure-based data aggregation methods are proposed to reduce the aggregation overhead to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(n\sqrt{n})$</tex-math></inline-formula> with constant rounds, as opposed to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(n\log n)$</tex-math></inline-formula> with <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(n)$</tex-math></inline-formula> round. Symmetric encryption and online/offline signature computation are adopted to mitigate the online computation burden. Moreover, the proposed scheme can rigorously defend against forgery attack, eavesdropping attack, and collusion attack. The performance evaluation and experiment results show that the proposed scheme improves the efficiency of communication with affordable computation costs for edge nodes.