HELIOS: Outsourcing of security operations in Green Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy-harvesting techniques for low-power embedded devices are opening up new opportunities for the design and optimization of security protocols for Green Wireless Sensor Networks. In this paper, we focus on scenarios where the energy resources of nodes in the network are heterogeneous, and propose a network-level solution that leverages the heterogeneity of harvesting capabilities to reduce the energy consumption of performing costly security operations. Our proposed distributed protocol, called HELIOS (Harvesting-EnabLed computatIon Outsourcing Scheme), allows nodes with scarce energy availability to outsource resource-demanding cryptographic operations to nodes that are harvesting power in excess, resulting in a significant reduction of their energy consumption.