Is Energy Efficiency the Key to Wireless Network Security?
Lowering power consumption while improving functionality is the new Holy Grail for consumer technology designers. This is especially true in areas like wireless devices where gadgets such as mobile phones and tablets continue to shrink in size, yet are expected to perform more and more functions. Being able to reduce battery drain is very important.
Using less energy, though, doesn’t come without its own set of risks; the biggest is network security. Next-generation devices use less power, while current network security methods require more power than these systems can provide.
One recent study could lead to more protected communications thanks to a new mathematical formulation that measures the energy efficiency of network security.
Previous research has attempted to solve this by looking for ways to increase the power in wireless devices, so that conventional security methods will have enough power to operate. However, Bo Bai and his team of researchers suggest that it may be more practical to make the process used to secure messages more efficient itself. In an article in IEEE Transactions on Communications, they present an algorithm that measures the “secure energy efficiency (EE),” the most efficient use of energy when relaying messages over a decode-and-forward relay channel.