Analyzing the Energy Consumption of Security Algorithms for Wireless LANs

Security in wireless networks is of paramount importance. Due to the broadcast nature of the wireless radio signals, wireless networks are implicitly vulnerable to several network attacks. Anyone within the wireless transmission range of a device (including malicious users or attackers) is able to passively listen to or eavesdrop on the signals and could potentially access information from the signals. It is also possible to actively transmit signals that can attack the network. Encryption algorithms play good roles in information security systems (ISS). Those algorithms consume a significant amount of computing resources such as CPU time, memory, and battery power. Wireless devices are powered by a battery which is a very limited resource. It implicitly says that the power of computing will grow exponentially. However, the capacity of batteries is growing linearly, and this introduces a "power gap" which is the difference between the power required by computing and the battery capacity. Thus, battery power tends to be a very seriously limited resource for small wireless devices, and a security protocol should utilize energy to the minimum extent possible. This aspect is the primary focus of this dissertation. This paper illustrates the key concepts of security, wireless networks, and security over wireless networks. It provides evaluation of six of the most common encryption algorithms on power consumption for wireless devices 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, battery power consumption