Evaluation of Overheads in Security Mechanisms in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are being used in many commercial and military applications to collect real time and event driven data. Deployment nature of sensor networks makes them vulnerable to security threats. Due to the resource limitations traditional security measures are not enough to protect sensor nodes. Research in sensor network security domains has produced several security solutions. In this paper we have observed three recently introduced security mechanisms (1) TinySec (2) MiniSec, and (3) TripleKeys. We have studied these security mechanisms in terms of packet overheads and compared the packet transmission time, average latency and energy consumption. Our comparison shows that the packet overheads in TripleKeys are lesser compared to other two schemes. We have then used the 38 bytes packet size of TripleKeys for further analysis and calculated the packet delivery ratio, latency and energy consumption. We have observed that packet delivery ratio decreases when we increase the number of nodes while latency and energy increases.