Energy Efficient Security Services for Limited Wireless Devices

Due to broadcast nature of wireless radio transmission, security services are of paramount importance to protect information exchanged in a wireless network. However, providing security services increases the computation and hence energy consumption due to cryptographic algorithms. Energy tends to be a very limited resource for wireless devices operating on battery. Thus, energy efficient security services are necessary to operate limited wireless devices securely. In this paper, we propose Tunable Security Model (TSM) to minimize energy consumption while providing security services such that the user's security level requirement is satisfied. From our experiments in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks, it is shown that using TSM can save up to 8% energy for low-level security, and up to 43% energy for high-level security.