Achieving efficient energy-aware security in IoT networks: a survey of recent solutions and research challenges

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), with thousands of connected, heterogeneous, and energy-constrained devices, enables new application domains and improves our everyday life. In many IoT applications, IoT devices are deployed in open environments, without physical access controls to them. Hence, they are exposed to various threats and malicious attacks that may dramatically impact the IoT network and cause physical or economical harm. Due to the limited energy storage of IoT devices, securing them against these threats incurs an additional energy consumption, thus, depleting their battery and reducing network lifetime. In the literature, there is a huge number of research works that propose solutions for either security or energy management for IoT networks. However, research on security solutions that offer a good trade-off between ensuring a good security level and reduced energy consumption is scarce. In addition to that, existing surveys focused either on IoT energy management or on IoT security but not on both of them. Motivated by the aforementioned points, we present in this article a survey based on a new approach that tackles jointly the problem of security and its impacts on the energy efficiency of IoT networks. We propose a taxonomy of recent solutions that reduce energy consumption while efficiently securing IoT networks. We consider context-aware security for IoT networks as a valid approach to secure IoT networks while reducing the overall energy consumption. We also present recent advances and new paradigms such as artificial intelligence and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and we discuss how they can be used to develop more robust and energy-aware security solutions for IoT. Finally, we present a general model for the development of energy-efficient IoT security solutions which provides a good trade-off between ensuring a high level of security for IoT applications while reducing energy consumption.