Energy consumption of cryptographic algorithms and security protocols in Symbian mobile devices

Abstract

Mobile communications have redefined people communications way. Electronic devices, whereby these communications are established. Have evolved significantly in power, throughput and in new functionalities, but they are still constrained by the battery life-time. This study focuses on this constraint and studies how it is impacted by the use of cryptography and secures protocols, paying attention at the most popular transport-layer security protocol: Secure Socket Layer (SSL). For the study, an experimental setup has been developed consisting in a Nokia N95 Symbian mobile device, a PC running Linux, the use of Nokia Energy Profiler for the energy measurements and the OpenSSL implementation of the SSL protocol for the coding of the client and server test applications. Based on the results, the use of security generates ail overhead that involves a high impact in energy consumption for small transaction sizes, that decreases as the size is increased.