The emergence of new data handling technologies and analytics enabled the organization of big data in processes as an innovative aspect in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Big data paradigm, combined with WSN technology, involves new challenges that are necessary to resolve in parallel. Data aggregation is a rapidly emerging research area. It represents one of the processing challenges of big sensor networks. This paper introduces the big data paradigm, its main dimensions that represent one of the most challenging concepts, and its principle analytic tools which are more and more introduced in the WSNs technology. The paper also presents the big data challenges that must be overcome to efficiently manipulate the voluminous data, and proposes a new classification of these challenges based on the necessities and the challenges of WSNs. As the big data aggregation challenge represents the center of our interest, this paper surveys its proposed strategies in WSNs.

Nowadays, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming challenging issue and used in many fields and applications. WSNS are characterized by many constraints as low energy, low computation capability and weak transmission range. The cloud computing is promising technology that can provide a flexible storage and processing infrastructure to process WSN's data in large scale. The two technologies (i.e.: WSNs, Cloud Computing) have gained significant research interest and their combining is a fundamental challenge that certainly will resolve many issues related to WSNs. In this paper we discuss firstly the idea of integrating WSNs in Cloud Computing starting with a state of the art analysis of existing approaches in this field. The second part of this paper is devoted to a comparative study between two efficient energy protocols that are proposed for WSNs.

Redundant data retransmission problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be eliminated using the data aggregation process which combines similar data to reduce the resource-consumption and consequently, saves energy during data transmission. In the recent days, many researchers have focused on securing this paradigm despite the constraints it imposes such as the limited resources. Most of the solutions proposed to secure the data aggregation process in WSNs are essentially based on the use of encryption keys to protect data during their transmission in the network. Indeed, the key generation and distribution mechanisms involve additional computation costs and consume more of energy. Considering this, in this paper, we propose a new security mechanism to secure data aggregation in WSNs called SDAW (secure data aggregation watermarking-based scheme in homogeneous WSNs). Our mechanism aims to secure the data aggregation process while saving energy. For this, the mechanism uses a lightweight fragile watermarking technique without encryption to insure the authentication and the integrity of the sensed data while saving the energy. The links between the sensor nodes and the aggregation nodes, and also the links between the aggregation nodes and the base station are secured by using the watermarking mechanism.

Data aggregation processes aim to reduce the amount of exchanged data in wireless sensor networks and consequently minimize the packet overhead and optimize energy efficiency. Securing the data aggregation process is a real challenge since the aggregation nodes must access the relayed data to apply the aggregation functions. The data aggregation security problem has been widely addressed in classical homogeneous wireless sensor networks, however, most of the proposed security protocols cannot guarantee a high level of security since the sensor node resources are limited. Heterogeneous wireless sensor networks have recently emerged as a new wireless sensor network category which expands the sensor nodes’ resources and capabilities. These new kinds of WSNs have opened new research opportunities where security represents a most attractive area. Indeed, robust and high security level algorithms can be used to secure the data aggregation at the heterogeneous aggregation nodes which is impossible in classical homogeneous WSNs. Contrary to the homogeneous sensor networks, the data aggregation security problem is still not sufficiently covered and the proposed data aggregation security protocols are numberless. To address this recent research area, this paper describes the data aggregation security problem in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks and surveys a few proposed security protocols. A classification and evaluation of the existing protocols is also introduced based on the adopted data aggregation security approach.