Abstract Security in a wireless sensor network is an essential requirement to safeguard the system from misuse of the collected data. In a wireless sensor network, the sensed data is to be transmitted to a base station securely and safely. In this process, data packets may route through multiple sensor nodes and reached the base station at the end. The encryption is the basic tool to protect data from vulnerable attacks in a wireless sensor network. Among the two basic encryption classes namely symmetric key encryption and asymmetric key encryption, the prior is most suitable for wireless sensor network for its simplicity and low computation cost. In this article, we propose a quaternion based encryption system applicable to the wireless sensor network with a key distribution scheme. We use the IEEE standard half-precision number system in the arrangement of special quaternions and secret keys. The quaternion encryption mainly rotates one quaternion w.r.t. an axis with a given angle and thereby produce a new quaternion. Experimental results for the encryption and decryption process and its efficiency is discussed in this article.

中文翻译：

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基于四元数的无线传感器网络高效数据加密技术

摘要 无线传感器网络中的安全性是保护系统免受滥用收集数据的基本要求。在无线传感器网络中，传感数据需要安全可靠地传输到基站。在这个过程中，数据包可能会经过多个传感器节点，最终到达基站。加密是保护数据免受无线传感器网络中易受攻击的攻击的基本工具。在对称密钥加密和非对称密钥加密这两个基本加密类别中，先验最适合无线传感器网络，因为它的简单性和低计算成本。在本文中，我们提出了一种适用于具有密钥分发方案的无线传感器网络的基于四元数的加密系统。我们在特殊四元数和密钥的排列中使用 IEEE 标准的半精度数系统。四元数加密主要是将一个四元数绕轴旋转一个给定的角度，从而产生一个新的四元数。本文讨论了加密和解密过程的实验结果及其效率。