Evaluation of symmetric encryption algorithms for MANETs

The growth of mobile networks has brought vast changes in mobile devices, middleware development, standards and network implementation. The nature of the mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) makes them very vulnerable to an adversary's malicious attacks. Providing security through cryptographic algorithms in these networks is very much essential. Among all the cryptographic algorithms, encryption algorithms play a main role in information security systems. Encryption algorithms are known to be computationally intensive. They consume a significant amount of computing resources such as CPU time, memory, and battery power. A wireless device, usually with very limited resources, especially battery power, is subject to the problem of energy consumption due to encryption algorithms. Designing energy efficient security protocols first requires an understanding of and data related to the energy consumption of common encryption schemes. This paper presents a comparison of the most commonly used symmetric encryption algorithms AES (Rijndael), DES, 3DES and Blowfish in terms of power consumption. A comparison has been conducted for those encryption algorithms at different data types like text, image, audio and video. Experimental results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of each algorithm.