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 energyconsumption model and indeed demonstrate the effectiveness of such approach.