  Nowadays, the increased use of battery-powered mobile appliances and the urge
to access time-sensitive data anytime anywhere has fuelled a high demand for
wireless networks. However, wireless networks are susceptible to intrusion and
security problems. There is an inherent need to secure the wireless data
communication to ensure the confidentiality, authenticity, integrity and non
repudiation of the data being exchanged. On the other hand, the computation and
the resultant energy consumption to achieve sufficient security can be high.
Encryption algorithms are generally computationally intensive, and consume a
significant amount of computing resources (such as CPU time, memory, and
battery power). Considering the limited resources on wireless devices, it is
crucial that security protocols be implemented efficiently. This manuscript
focuses on how energy consumption is impacted by the use of unoptimised
AES-CCMP algorithms and proposes an optimized AES CCMP algorithm using 2-way
interleaving that does not compromise the security of wireless communication
sessions. There is also analysis of the performance of AES (a.k.a. Rijndael) in
its AES-CCMP implementation. The 2-way interleaving technique is an
optimization of the CBC-MAC that is investigated using two performance metrics
(namely encryption time and throughput).
