Power-Efficient Architecture of Zigbee Security Processing

In general, the cryptographic operation in wireless devices which have low memory and low computing power causes the system overhead, so that it badly affects the performance of other tasks. Therefore, it is positively necessary to implement the security hardware which is dedicated to the cryptographic operation. Early researches about the security hardware architectures make design metrics with data throughput, gate usage, and power consumption to demonstrate the efficiency of their architectures. In this paper, we provide an efficient hardware architecture of the security processing for ZigBee, which satisfies the constraints IEEE 802.15.4 standard requires. These requirements mainly consist of the critical response time, the verification delay, and the throughput. In experiments, we implemented the security processing for ZigBee that used fewer logic gates and consumed low power than other earlier ZigBee chips and fulfilled the standard requirements with considerable margins.