Practical Evaluation of the Performance Impact of Security Mechanisms in Sensor Networks

Security has become a major concern for many real-world applications for wireless sensor networks (WSN). In this domain, many security solutions have been proposed. Usually, all these approaches are based on well-known cryptographic algorithms. At the same time, performance studies have shown that the applicability of sensor networks strongly depends on effective routing decisions or energy aware wireless communication. This observation correlates with the emergence of new application scenarios. Security mechanisms were rarely included in such measurements and studies and only few approaches were analyzed in experimental setups. Therefore, only theoretical measures were applied to demonstrate and discuss the behavior of security solutions. In this paper, we used an experimental setup for the verification of runtime behavior of several cryptographic algorithms including MD5, SHA-1, and AES. We used typical sensor hardware to get reasonable results. Based on our experiments, we provide some analysis and considerations on practical feasibility of such cryptographic algorithms in sensor networks.