GIT-CERCS-04-01
Arnab Paul, Umakishore Ramachandran,
Computation-Communication Trade-off for Power and Bandwidth Savings in Remote
Authentication over Wireless Networks
We consider the problem of remote authentication over
a long range wireless network using large signature keys
such as biometric samples (fingerprint, retinal scans etc.).
Because of the large size of these keys, and continual
need for authentication, considerable power and bandwidth is
consumed by such processes. We show that by using the
concept of a holographic proof, it is possible to significantly
cut down the number of bytes transferred. While bandwidth savings
is obvious,
for long range wireless this means huge savings in power which
is a critical resource for mobile devices.
Our approach trades computaion for communication, the intuition being that power requirement for transmitting one byte over wireless
is orders of magnitude higher than executing one instruction on a standard
processor. Our simulations provide a detailed analysis of power savings
under a reasonable energy-consumption model and indeed demonstrate the
effectiveness of such approach.