A framework for security and workload gradual adaptation

Providing a balanced trade-off among performances, security, and energy consumption is a key challenge in embedded systems. Traditional security solutions assume a well-known and static operating environment, thus leading to a static system configuration that cannot be tailed to the system conditions. Wireless sensor networks are a good example of typical embedded systems. In this work we propose a framework that reduces energy consumption in nodes of wireless sensor networks. The framework allows the system to self-modify its security and workload settings. Adaptations are performed by moving to adjacent configuration and, thus, this mechanism is named gradual adaptation. In this paper we discuss the policies that can be used to control the adaptations and we present the results obtained when implementing a case study on Sun SPOT nodes. The results show that the use of the framework increases the energy efficiency of the network nodes. Furthermore, they show the effects of the different policies on the behavior of nodes.