An investigation into the design of energy-efficient session negotiation protocols for wireless networks

Security protocols use session negotiation protocols for establishing and managing secure sessions and secure data exchange protocols for secure data communications. Deployment of resource-intensive security protocols in battery-powered mobile devices has elevated energy characteristics to an important design metric. In this paper we study the energy consumption characteristics of secure session negotiation protocols within the framework of Internet security protocol (IPSec). Based on the observations made we present techniques to optimize the energy consumed by session negotiation protocols. Proposed techniques achieve 5x to 11x energy savings without compromising the session security. We show that the proposed techniques are platform independent and discuss the impact of platform specific characteristics, such as available system resources, on the energy characteristics of the system.