Performance of state based key hop (SBKH) protocol for security on wireless networks

State based key hop (SBKH) protocol is a novel, simple encryption scheme that uses RC4 encryption technique in a way that provides robust security with reduced processing cost, compared to 802.11 security protocols: wired equivalent privacy (WEP) and wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) protected access (WPA). Low processing cost makes SBKH suitable for battery-operated devices, such as wireless sensors, and ease of implementation and maintenance make it suitable for small office home office (SOHO) user nodes. We present a performance analysis of the SBKH protocol and compare it with a performance analysis of WEP and WPA. The analysis reveals that SBKH is significantly more power efficient in terms of processing compared to WEP, WPA 1.0 and WPA 2.0 for all packet sizes.