A Hybrid Adaptive Security Framework for IEEE 802.15.4-based Wireless Sensor Networks

With the advent of ubiquitous computing society, many advanced technologies have enabled wireless sensor networks which consist of small sensor nodes. However, the sensor nodes have limited computing resources such as small size memory, low battery life, short transmission range, and low computational capabilities. Thus, decreasing energy consumption is one of the most significant issues in wireless sensor networks. In addition, numerous applications for wireless sensor networks are recently spreading to various fields (health-care, surveillance, location tracking, unmanned monitoring, nuclear reactor control, crop harvesting control, u-city, building automation etc.). For many of them, supporting security functionalities is an indispensable feature. Especially in case wireless sensor networks should provide a sufficient variety of security functions, sensor nodes are required to have more powerful performance and more energy demanding features. In other words, simultaneously providing security features and saving energy faces a trade-off problem. This paper presents a novel energy-efficient security architecture in an IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless sensor network called the Hybrid Adaptive Security (HAS) framework in order to resolve the trade off issue between security and energy. Moreover, we present a performance analysis based on the experimental results and a real implementation model in order to verify the proposed approach.