Wireless Transmission Energy Analysis for Interference-Aware and Confidentiality-Enhanced Multipath Routing

Two of the most important concerns in today's wireless network systems and mobile devices are communication security and energy consumption. Most of the time, wireless system designers treat these two issues separately, which usually results in a non-optimized final product. In general, the more security features a system uses, the more energy it consumes. While it is arguable about what an optimized system is, it is certainly beneficial to study the details of these tradeoffs which can provide insights into the design in the future. In this paper, we investigate the tradeoffs between the energy and security when the wireless multi-hop routing involves confidentiality-enhanced multipath routing and radio interference-aware routing. Intuitively, if multipath routing is employed to enhance data confidentiality, the overall energy consumption increases because more mobile device antennas become active on multiple paths and they raise up the radio interference level. However, as our study shows, while high-density wireless networks suffer from high energy problems when strong confidentiality is supported by multipath routing, employing radio propagation directionality properly can provide both enhanced security and reduced energy consumption at a reasonable level.