DRKH: A Power Efficient Encryption Protocol forWireless Devices

In this paper, we present dynamic rekeying with key hopping (DRKH) encryption protocol that uses RC4 encryption technique to ensure a strong security level with the advantage of low execution cost compared to other IEEE 802.11 security schemes. Low computational complexity makes DRKH suitable for solar- and battery-powered handheld devices such as nodes in Solar ESS (extended service set) and wireless sensor networks. Our design goal is to eventually integrate DRKH with different emerging wireless technologies. However, in this paper, we focus on the integration of DRKH with 802.11 standard since it is the most widely deployed wireless technology. The results and analysis show that DRKH overcomes all the security threats with wired equivalent privacy (WEP) protocol while consuming a much lower power than WEP, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) 1.0 and WPA 2.0