This thesis introduces the Farming Lightweight Protocol (FLP) optimized for energy-restricted environments that depend upon secure communication, such as multi-robot information gathering systems within the vision of ``smart\u27\u27 agriculture. FLP uses a hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) to achieve data integrity. HMAC implementations, resting upon repeated use of the SHA256 hashing operator, impose additional resource requirements and thus also impact system availability. We address this particular integrity/availability trade-off by proposing an energy-saving algorithmic engineering method on the internal SHA256 hashing operator. The energy-efficient hash is designed to maintain the original security benefits yet reduce the negative effects on system availability.
A simulation environment was created to represent several FLPs of practical character, each utilizing HMAC in a consistent manner assuming inputs of configurable size. We then conducted simulation experiments to test our energy-saving algorithmic engineering method for HMAC computations. Using the RAPL API from Intel, we measured computational energy for each input size and FLP protocol variant under study. Our results show that our method reduces energy usage by 11% on average, while maintaining the core capabilities of the FLP protocol without compromising security performance
