An energy efficient link-layer security protocol for wireless sensor networks

In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have found use in a variety of different applications including environmental monitoring, battlefield strategy planning, health monitoring, and so forth. With many of the applications involving communication of highly sensitive data, security becomes a primary concern. However, incorporating security features in WSNs is challenging due to the specific constraints such as limited memory and restricted energy supply. In this paper, we investigate the importance of the link-layer security service in WSNs and propose an energy efficient link-layer security protocol (LLSP) to reduce the energy consumption in the network. Comparing with the existing TinySec protocol, which provides node authentication, message confidentiality and access control, the proposed LLSP protocol provides replay protection while reducing the security overhead per packet by 17%. Throughout this paper we analyze and compare the performance as well as the energy consumption of TinySec and LLSP security protocols. Furthermore, we investigate the throughput of the system over both error-free and lossy channels using the LLSP protocol. In addition to stronger security measures, the simulation results demonstrate that LLSP outperforms TinySec in terms of energy reduction and throughput performance.