Energy Analysis of RSA and ELGAMAL Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks are primarily designed for real-time collection and analysis of low level data in hostile environments. Basically sensor networks are application dependent. Wireless sensor network (WSN) applications can be classified into two - event based and Continuous monitoring. This paper focuses on continuous monitoring application. One of the major challenges of wireless sensor network is security. The security of WSNs poses challenges because of the criticality of the data sensed by a node and in turn the node meets severe constraints like minimal energy, computational and communicational capabilities. Taking all the above said challenges energy efficiency or battery life time plays a major role in network lifetime. Providing security consumes some energy consumed by a node, so there is a need to reduce the energy thus the cost incurred by security algorithm.In this paper the performance of the RSA cryptography algorithm is compared with the ELGAMAL cryptography algorithm by evaluating their energy efficiency and network lifetime. A cluster based wireless network topology environment is constructed and their performances were compared in NS2 and the result shows that RSA algorithm consumes less energy than ELGAMAL algorithm.