Virtual platform for power and security analysis of wireless sensor network

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) include low-power and low-cost devices (nodes) with demanding power requirements (long autonomous lifetime). The nodes have to use the available battery carefully and avoid expensive computations or radio transmissions. Therefore, effective simulation mechanisms that allow the developer to obtain estimations at the early stages of the WSN design, prior to deployment, are necessary. Power consumption is not the only important concern in this design but security is becoming a real problem too, since some WSNs process sensitive data. Thus, it is necessary to ensure that the processed data are tamper-proof. This paper proposes a framework for network simulation and embedded SW performance analysis that focuses not only on time and power estimation but also on two new metrics: the "entropy security-oriented metric" provides information about the security encryption used in WSN transmissions and the "heterogeneity metric" provides information to help avoid "replication attacks". All this information will aid in the whole WSN deployment design, providing useful metrics about power and security.