Securing Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks using Decentralized Blockchain Protocols
S. Saraswathi · 2025
WSN s (Wireless Sensor Networks) play a critical role in numerous real-time monitoring applications, such as environmental monitoring, industrial automation, and smart cities. Data aggregation is a significant challenge in WSN s because they are inherently decentralized, resource-constrained, and vulnerable. Traditional data aggregation is reliant on centralized entities, which is a single point of failure and is vulnerable to data tampering, packet loss, or node compromise. Gathering data from different sense nodes (SN s) using decentralized blockchain protocols is a recent phenomenon in the information communication technology (ICT) domain, which ensures trust, integrity, and confidentiality in data transmission that offers trust in the widely deployed WSN and IoT networks; this paper presents the evidence for said novel approach. The aggregated data being immutable and distributed on blockchain makes them unalterable once validated whereas smart contracts allow them to be validated dynamically without the need of third party intervention. We propose a lightweight consensus for sensor nodes in the model to trade-off energy consumption and the computational cost. We also apply homomorphic encryption to guarantee privacy-preserving aggregation in transmission as well as storage. Methodologically, our framework exhibits greater resilience to such common attacks as data forgery and Sybil attacks, without sacrificing competitive latency and throughput, as shown through simulations and comparative analysis. Finally, we evaluate our model against classical secure aggregation algorithms to demonstrate its merit on decentralization, trust, and scalability aspects. This work paves the way towards designing a secure and tamper-resistant data aggregation framework within WSNs, ultimately enabling future applications where high security and reliability are critical parameters.