Abstract:
The importance of security in data communications and networking cannot be overemphasized.
Security in networking is based on cryptography, the science and art of
transforming messages to make them secure and free from attacks and all sorts of
eavesdropping. Cryptography has diverse applications in network security. Encryption
algorithms are known to be computationally intensive. They consume a significant amount
of computing resources such as CPU time, memory, and battery power. A wireless device,
usually with very limited resources, especially battery power, is subject to the problem of
energy consumption due to encryption algorithms. Designing energy efficient security
protocols first requires an understanding of and data related to the energy consumption of
common encryption schemes. This paper gives an experimental analysis of performance of a
number of symmetric or private-key encryption algorithms: DES, 3DES, RC2, RC6,
Blowfish and AES. In order to design energy efficient security protocols, there is need to
critically study and understand encryption schemes within the context of performance metrics
like varying sizes of data blocks, different key sizes, battery power consumption and
encryption/decryption speeds. In this experiment, several performance metrics are collected
and analyzed: encryption time, throughput, battery power and transmission time
