An Empirical Evaluation of Various Digital Signature Scheme in Wireless Sensor Network

Sensor node authentication and integrity of data are of utmost importance in many decision-making processes in wireless sensor networks, with the intent that every necessary data must be digitally signed by its sensor node to send data cautiously on wireless network. No one should unlock the data other than the sink node, since only the sink node can have privilege for the verification of data. The key generation process and/or the verification process is certainly a difficult job, and it would wear out the sensor having minimal operational resources. This paper studies and evaluates different types of digital signature algorithms, such as ECDSA, RSA, OTS, Lightweight digital signature and identity-based signature, and compares their key sizes, computational and energy cost in WSN. It has been found that elliptic curve digital signature algorithm has significant benefit over other public-key algorithms in WSN, as it minimizes computational time, amount of data transmission and storage.