Security Cost Aware Data Communication in Low-Power IoT Sensors with Energy Harvesting

Security is a critical concern in low-power IoT (Internet of Things) wireless sensors because these resource constrained devices are easy to attack and meanwhile the energy constraint sensors will consume a lot of energy to run algorithms for security purposes. We study the energy efficiency data transmission problem in IoT sensors that use capacitors to harvest wireless energy while considering the energy cost for running security algorithms. Energy harvesting with capacitors has the characteristic that the energy harvesting rate varies over time, and it is getting slower and slower as the capacitor gets more and more wireless energy. This observation will result in a trade-off for data transmission in two ways: (1) dividing data into more number of packets, thus the sensors can receive wireless energy at a higher harvesting rate, but it will result in extra energy consumption; (2) dividing data into less numbers of packets-in this way, the sensor cannot utilize the high harvesting rate, but the extra energy cost is less. We studied two sets of this problem where the low-power sensors can harvest enough wireless energy or not, and give algorithms to transmit all the data or as much data as possible, respectively, while taking into account extra cost. The theoretical performance of the proposed algorithms is also analyzed. Both theoretical analysis and extensive simulations show that the proposed algorithms have good performance.