Comparative performance and energy consumption analysis of different AES implementations on a wireless sensor network node

Many of the diverse Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications, such as home automation, traffic control and medical patient monitoring, have a strong requirement for the confidentiality of sensing data. At the same time, the restricted resources of WSN nodes demand that applications are implemented as efficiently as possible. Recently, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) has been proposed as the preferable symmetric cipher for WSN applications. This paper presents a performance and energy consumption analysis of three AES implementations on a wireless sensor node. For each implementation the memory requirements, the execution time and the energy consumption are monitored. The results of the presented analysis show that while the hardware-supported AES is faster than the software implementations, it is less energy efficient due to increased power requirements of the additional hardware.