A Survey of Security Protocols in WSN and Overhead Evaluation

There has been a widespread growth in the area of wireless sensor networks mainly because of the tremendous possibility of using it in a wide spectrum of applications such as home automation, wildlife monitoring, defense applications, medical applications and so on. However, due to the inherent limitations of sensor networks, commonly used security mechanisms are hard to implement in these networks. For this very reason, security becomes a crucial issue and these networks face a wide variety of attacks right from the physical layer to application layer. This paper present a survey that investigates the overhead due to the implementation of some common security mechanisms viz. SPINS, TinySec and MiniSec and also the computational overhead in the implementation of three popular symmetric encryption algorithms namely RC5 AES and Skipjack.