Performance analysis of physical layer security over different error correcting codes in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Nowadays wireless sensor networks are becoming very important part in our daily life as it is adopted in various applications. However wireless sensor networks are vulnerable to many attacks such as denial of service. Therefore, the number of security threats has increased dramatically due to the increase in the number of applications adopted wireless sensor networks. Physical layer security is considered to be more robust than upper layers security. In this paper we address the problem of evaluating popular techniques (Reed Solomon techniques and scrambled error correcting) in term of security gap which is the difference between the signal to noise ratio of the legitimate receiver and the signal to noise ratio of the eavesdropper. Our work compare scrambled t-error correcting codes with Reed Solomon using bit error rate and security gap. Experiments and analysis showed that Reed Solomon has almost the same security gap as scrambled error correcting codes which requires more computational power than Reed Solomon.