Adaptable Security in Wireless Sensor Networks by Using Reconfigurable ECC Hardware Coprocessors

Specific features of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) like the open accessibility to nodes, or the easy observability of radio communications, lead to severe security challenges. The application of traditional security schemes on sensor nodes is limited due to the restricted computation capability, low-power availability, and the inherent low data rate. In order to avoid dependencies on a compromised level of security, a WSN node with a microcontroller and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is used along this work to implement a state-of-the art solution based on ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography). In this paper it is described how the reconfiguration possibilities of the system can be used to adapt ECC parameters in order to increase or reduce the security level depending on the application scenario or the energy budget. Two setups have been created to compare the software- and hardware-supported approaches. According to the results, the FPGA-based ECC implementation requires three orders of magnitude less energy, compared with a low power microcontroller implementation, even considering the power consumption overhead introduced by the hardware reconfiguratio

Gathering Sensor Data in Home Networks with IPFIX

Abstract. New developments in military, health and home areas call for new approaches for data acquisition in real-time. Such application areas frequently include challenging requirements for collection, process-ing and analysis of environmental data. Wireless Sensor Networks can collect such environmental data efficiently. Collected sensor node data needs to be transmitted in an efficient way due to limitations of sensor node resources in battery power and available bandwidth. In this paper, we present a method for efficient transmission of sensor measurement data using the IETF standard IPFIX. We show that its template based design is suitable for efficient transmission of senor data with low band-width consumption. In this paper, we present the protocol and its imple-mentation in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Additionally, a header compression scheme is introduced which further reduces communication cost during data transmission.