Exploiting value locality for secure-energy aware communication

Minimizing energy consumption is important for prolonging the life of battery-powered sensor nodes. A major portion of a sensor power budget in a distributed sensor network is consumed by communication with adjacent nodes. Another issue with the communication of data among the sensor nodes is the possibility of leaking confidential sensed data to adversaries. The adoption of standard encryption techniques for protecting the transmitted data is not attractive in this environment as it is costly in terms of energy consumption. We present a new energy-efficient and secure communication protocol that exploits the locality of data transfer in distributed sensor networks. Our evaluation reveals that the proposed technique is specifically effective in sensor applications that involve frequent communications with a high data locality.