  The linear and grid based Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are formed by
applications where objects being monitored are either placed in linear or grid
based form. E.g. monitoring oil, water or gas pipelines; perimeter
surveillance; monitoring traffic level of city streets, goods warehouse
monitoring. The security of data is a critical issue for all such applications
and as the devices used for the monitoring purpose have several resource
constraints (bandwidth, storage capacity, battery life); it is significant to
have a lightweight security solution. Therefore, we consider symmetric key
based solutions proposed in the literature as asymmetric based solutions
require more computation, energy and storage of keys. We analyse the symmetric
ciphers with respect to the performance parameters: RAM, ROM consumption and
number of CPU cycles. We perform this simulation analysis in Contiki Cooja by
considering an example scenario on two different motes namely: Sky and Z1. The
aim of this analysis is to come up with the best suited symmetric key based
cipher for the linear and grid based WSN.
