Energy Efficiency of Encryption Schemes for Wireless Devices

Encryption algorithms are known to be computationally intensive.They play a main role in information security systems. On the other side, those algorithms consume a significant amount of computing resources such as CPU time, memory, and battery power. This paper tries to present a fair comparison between the most common and used algorithms in data encryption field according to power consumption. It provides evaluation of six of the most common encryption algorithms namely: AES (Rijndael), DES, 3DES, RC2, Blowfish, and RC6. A comparison has been conducted for those encryption algorithms at different settings for each algorithm such as different sizes of data blocks, different data types, and finally encryption/decryption speed. Experimental results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of each algorithm.