Incorporating Security and Energy Efficiency for Multimedia Communications in WANets

Abstract

The security of multimedia data in Wireless Ad hoc Networks (WANet) is commonly provided by encryption, which consists in transforming a plain text message into an unintelligible ciphertext. Nevertheless, the classical and modern ciphers have all been developed without taking into consideration the intrinsic characteristics of multimedia flows. In this chapter, the author proposes to reduce the computational requirements for the multimedia flow’s encryption when the energy is a limited resource, as it is the case of WANets. Thus, the chapter defines a new profile of Secure Real Time Protocol (SRTP), named EE_SRTP. EE_SRTP provides energy efficiency to SRTP, which provides essentially confidentiality, message authentication, and replay protection to the RTP traffic. In EE_SRTP, the author exploits the dependency existing between the frames created by the inter-frame coding to further improve the energy-efficiency of the encryption process. In contrast with the existing approaches, this chapter presents an experimental model that integrates EE_SRTP to Video LAN Coding (VLC). Therefore, to validate EE_SRTP, the author implements a secure version of VLC (SecVLC). The performance evaluation demonstrates clearly that using this new scheme in the context of wireless ad hoc nodes allows saving energy while ensuring a high level of content confidentiality, without adding an overhead to the wireless network.