Coding and cryptography for resource constrained wireless sensor networks: A hardware-software co-design approach

Wireless sensor networks gained a lot of attention in recent years due to their widespread applications potential. Given their versatility, it is expected that they will play an ever increasing role in our daily life. For many of these applications, security and reliability of communication play a crucial role. In this paper we analyse some system design issues related to sensor networks by considering public and private key cryptography and block coding as potential candidates to address the above issue. In particular we consider architectures which could be easily adapted to various protocols.