Hardware acceleration of combined cipher and forward error correction for low-power wireless applications

Encryption and channel coding are both essential steps for reliable, robust and secure operation within wireless networks. Usually, these algorithms are considered independently of each other because of their antagonism, but solutions exist to combine their features into a single simple primitive. This fusion aims to improve the performance and the energy-efficiency of the wireless device while contributing to the dependability of the whole system. The introduction of a dedicated core implemented on field-programmable logic tightly coupled to the central controller of a wireless sensor node demonstrates further benefits for the energy-efficiency of the system.