• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.2111-2131
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• 2015

Tiered wireless sensor network is a network model of flexibility and robustness, which consists of the traditional resource-limited sensor nodes and the resource-abundant storage nodes. In such architecture, collected data from the sensor nodes are periodically submitted to the nearby storage nodes for archive purpose. When a query is requested, storage nodes also process the query and return qualified data as the result to the base station. The role of the storage nodes leads to an attack prone situation and leaves them more vulnerable in a hostile environment. If any of them is compromised, fake data may be injected into and/or qualified data may be discarded. And the base station would receive incorrect answers incurring malfunction to applications. In this paper, an efficient verifiable top-k query processing scheme called EVTQ is proposed, which is capable of verifying the authentication and completeness of the results. Collected data items with the embedded information of ordering and adjacent relationship through a hashed message authentication coding function, which serves as a validation code, are submitted from the sensor nodes to the storage nodes. Any injected or incomplete data in the returned result from a corresponded storage node is detected by the validation code at the base station. For saving communication cost, two optimized solutions that fuse and compress validation codes are presented. Experiments on communication cost show the proposed method is more efficiency than previous works.