Optimizing Ipsec for Energy-Efficient Secure Wireless Sessions

Deployment of security protocols in battery-powered mobile devices has elevated energy consumption to an important design metric of network design. In this chapter we identified the various sources of energy consumption during the setup, operation and tear down of a secure wireless session. We used Internet Security Protocol (IPSec) for our analysis and developed techniques based on information compression, session negotiation protocol optimization and choice of cryptographic primitives to reduce the energy consumed by a secure wireless session. A mobile test bed was developed to validate our energy management schemes which showed that the proposed schemes were able to reduce the session establishment energy by more than 6.5× and the secure data communication energy by more than 25× during data transmission and by more than 3.8× during data reception.