An Experimental Study on Energy Consumption of Video Encryption for Mobile Handheld Devices

Secure video communication on mobile handheld devices is challenging mainly due to (a) the significant computational needs of both video coding and encryption algorithms and (b) the limited battery capacity of handheld devices. In this paper, we evaluate several video encryption schemes from the perspective of energy consumption both analytically and experimentally. Specifically, we implement video encryption schemes on mobile handhelds to support a H.263 based secure video application, and extensively measure the energy consumption due to encoding and encryption for several classes of video clips. Contrary to popular belief, our experiments show that energy overhead of full video encryption is insignificant compared to the energy consumed for video encoding (between 2% and 4% of total energy cost) in most cases