Abstract
Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSNs) represent an interesting new paradigm where individual nodes forming a network are powered by energy sources scavenged from the surrounding environment. This technique provides numerous advantages, but also new design challenges. Securing the communications under energy constraints represents one of these key challenges. The amount of energy available is theoretically infinite in the long run but highly variable over short periods of time, and managing it is a crucial aspect. In this paper we present an adaptive approach for security in multihop EH-WSNs which allows different nodes to dynamically choose the most appropriate energy-affecting parameters such as encryption algorithm and key size, providing in this way energy savings. In order to provide evidence of the approach's feasibility in a real-world network, we have designed and implemented it as extension of on-demand medium access control (ODMAC), a receiver-initiated (RI) MAC protocol specifically designed and developed to address the foundational energy-related needs of Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks.
Highlights
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are more and more pervasive, consistently used to perform many different kinds of monitoring tasks, ranging all the way from outdoor surveillance to body area networks
The idea is that each node can advertise all the different supported schemes and dynamically adjust them, depending on the current energy situation
The results show that Galois counter mode (GCM) in combination with advanced encryption standard (AES) obtains a 12% increase in energy consumption, a 28% increase in RAM usage, and a 35% decrease in throughput compared to the original implementation of TinySec
Summary
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are more and more pervasive, consistently used to perform many different kinds of monitoring tasks, ranging all the way from outdoor surveillance to body area networks. The classic means of operation for sensor nodes have been batteries; thanks to technological advancements Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSNs) are quickly becoming a reality. Depending on the topology and the application being run, this might impact availability or even disconnect the network Given their use in critical situations, WSNs require solid and reliable security capabilities. A similar point can be made for the key size of an algorithm; a longer key is bound to produce higher energy requirements, despite the fact that it should increase the complexity of the cryptanalysis and the robustness of the cipher-text For this reason, when energy is a big concern, having to commit to a specific algorithm is going to be a suboptimal decision. In this paper we discuss and propose an adaptive security scheme that allows each node to autonomously and independently choose the most suitable security algorithm to use for a given link of the network and for a given energy configuration.
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