Energy has been an important subject these recent years. While some people are advocating more efficient and sustainable use of energy through the green energy movement, some scientific and engineering fields should include efficient energy usage into the equation in order to provide an effective solution. One of these fields is wireless sensor network. Wireless sensor network is a subdomain of distributed system. The network consists of distributed nodes that communicate one another wirelessly. As the name entitles, nodes are equipped with sensing capability (humidity, temperature, air pressure, etc) and these sensed data should be delivered to a collecting point, which is usually named sink node, to be processed later. Unlike traditional network that is connected to sufficient power-supply, nodes in wireless sensor network (other than sink node) are usually restricted to energy-constraint. The nodes are mostly powered by battery packages and due to the placement of these nodes in topographically challenging area, frequent battery replacement is undesirable. Thus, it is imperative to involve efficient energy usage in the design.

In some circumstances, communication between nodes should be secured. Yet, secure communication comes with some overheads at a cost due to the extra processing conducted to secure the data. These overheads are later translated as additional energy consumption that leads to faster battery depletion. This paper tries to propose adaptive security mechanisms for wireless sensor network that aims at reducing the overhead incurred in a secure communication thus prolonging the operational duration of the network.

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Energy-aware Security Management Utilizing Adaptive Security Mechanisms for Wireless Sensor Networks (3427 downloads )