Performance analysis of message authentication algorithms in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Security in an important concern in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) because of wide range of applications like health care monitoring, wildlife monitoring, highway traffic monitoring, earthquake monitoring, and many military applications. All these applications require information to be communicate in a secure way without any type of modification by attackers. Therefore, an authentication mechanism is needed to check the authenticity of messages that are communicated with in the network. This paper presents the extensive performance analysis of various message authentication algorithms in terms of communication overhead, computational overhead, memory overhead and security level. Also the paper proposed the lightweight message authentication algorithm that covers all the demerits of the algorithm discussed in literature. The proposed algorithm generates the fixed size hash digest that is used for the authentication of messages within WSN. Also, the proposed algorithm results in low communication overhead, computational overhead, memory overhead and attain high level of security.