Experimental evaluations of security impact on IEEE 802.15.4 networks

During these last years, IEEE 802.15.4 [1] has been asserting itself as one of the most promising standards for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). It includes a security sublayer which provides a number of operations and procedures aimed at securing network communications. In spite of the strong interest for the standard from the academic community, so far not so many research works have considered IEEE 802.15.4-2006 security services and their impact on performance. We have realized an open-source implementation of the IEEE 802.15.4 security sublayer, by means of which we aim at evaluating security costs experimentally, with real hardware under realistic conditions.