Cryptography Overhead Evaluation and Analysis for Wireless Sensor Networks

Security is a critical factor to deploy large scale wireless sensor networks. Limited resource constraints, such as computation power, program memory, SRAM, and energy budget, present a big challenge to implement existing cryptography algorithms. In this paper, we evaluate the overhead of comprehensive cryptography algorithms suitable for wireless sensor networks. All the factors that may affect algorithm choice, including SRAM which is critical for network operations and always ignored by previous works, are analyzed. According to our experimental results, SkipJack, RC4, and HIGHT are the best candidates for time critical or energy efficient applications. However, if SRAM is more stringent than time and energy, TEA, SEA, and SkipJack are better than other candidates because their SRAM requirements are non-key-related.