On the security and energy consumption estimation of wireless sensor network protocols

Along with the recent rapid development of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) systems, the range of attacks against WSN routing protocols have grown. As a result, there is an increased need for secure WSN routing protocols. WSN routing protocols should be secured once they are involved in sensitive data transmission. However, secure routing protocols require extra time and energy for security computations. Further, due to the limited power supply of WSN nodes, it is useful to theoretically evaluate the energy consumption of the protocol prior to their deployment. This thesis concerns the energy efficiency of WSN routing protocols and the cost of security in terms of additional energy dissipation. Two new secure routing protocols are proposed and their security is analyzed. Further, the energy consumption of the new protocols is evaluated using estimation methods and empirical measurements. Comparison of these results reveals that current estimation models have significant inaccuracies. A new energy consumption estimation model is proposed that computes the energy consumption of microcontrollers during: security operations, memory read-write operations and radio transceiver actions. Applying the proposed estimation model against the previously analyzed protocols demonstrates that it more accurately forecasts the actual energy consumption than traditional models.