The Cost of Security: Performance of ZigBee Key Exchange Mechanism in an 802.15.4 Beacon Enabled Cluster

The IEEE 802.15.4 specification is a recent low data rate wireless personal area network standard. While basic security services are provided for, there is a lack of more advanced techniques which are indispensable in modern personal area network applications. In addition, performance implications of those services are not known. In this paper, we describe a secure data exchange protocol based on the ZigBee specification and built on top of 802.15.4 link layer. This protocol includes a key exchange mechanism. Then, we evaluate the overhead of this scheme under different application scenarios. Initial results show the range of network and traffic parameters wherein the proposed scheme is feasible to use