A Framework for Managing Device Association and Offloading the Transport Layer’s Security Overhead of WiFi Device to Access Points

Considering the resource constraints of Internet of Things (IoT) stations, establishing secure communication between stations and remote servers imposes a significant overhead on these stations in terms of energy cost and processing load. This overhead, in particular, is considerable in networks providing high communication rates and frequent data exchange, such as those relying on the IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) standard. This paper proposes a framework for offloading the processing overhead of secure communication protocols to WiFi access points (APs) in deployments where multiple APs exist. Within this framework, the main problem is finding the AP with sufficient computation and communication capacities to ensure secure and efficient transmissions for the stations associated with that AP. Based on the data-driven profiles obtained from empirical measurements, the proposed framework offloads most heavy security computations from the stations to the APs. We model the association problem as an optimization process with a multi-objective function. The goal is to achieve maximum network throughput via the minimum number of APs while satisfying the security requirements and the APs’ computation and communication capacities. The optimization problem is solved using genetic algorithms (GAs) with constraints extracted from a physical testbed. Experimental results demonstrate the practicality and feasibility of our comprehensive framework in terms of task and energy efficiency as well as security.