In this paper, we introduce a highly optimized software implementation of standards-compliant elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for wireless sensor nodes equipped with an 8-bit AVR microcontroller. We exploit the state-of-the-art optimizations and propose novel techniques to further push the performance envelope of a scalar multiplication on the NIST P-192 curve. To illustrate the performance of our ECC software, we develope the prototype implementations of different cryptographic schemes for securing communication in a wireless sensor network, including elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange, the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA), and the elliptic curve Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (ECMQV) protocol. We obtain record-setting execution times for fixed-base, point variable-base, and double-base scalar multiplication. Compared with the related work, our ECDH key exchange achieves a performance gain of roughly 27% over the best previously published result using the NIST P-192 curve on the same platform, while our ECDSA performs twice as fast as the ECDSA implementation of the well-known TinyECC library. We also evaluate the impact of Karatsuba's multiplication technique on the overall execution time of a scalar multiplication. In addition to offering high performance, our implementation of scalar multiplication has a highly regular execution profile, which helps to protect against certain side-channel attacks. Our results show that NIST-compliant ECC can be implemented efficiently enough to be suitable for resource-constrained sensor nodes.