Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

Multicast Mobility in Mobile IP Version 6 (MIPv6) : Problem Statement and Brief Survey

Publisher PD

A Hierarchical Approach to Position-Based Multicast for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

In this paper we present Scalable Position-Based Multicast (SPBM), a multicast routing protocol for ad-hoc networks. SPBM uses the geographic position of nodes to provide a highly scalable group membership scheme and to forward data packets in a way that is very robust to changes in the topology of the network. SPBM bases the forwarding decision on whether there are group members located in a given direction or not, allowing for a hierarchical aggregation of membership information: the further away a region is from an intermediate node the higher the level of aggregation should be for this region. Because of aggregation, the overhead for group membership management scales logarithmically with the number of nodes and is independent of the number of multicast senders for a given multicast group. Furthermore, we show that group management overhead is bounded by a constant if the frequency of membership updates is scaled down with the aggregation level. This scaling of the update frequency is reasonable since the higher the level of aggregation the lower the number of membership changes for the aggregate. The performance of SPBM is investigated by means of simulation, including a comparison with ODMRP, and through mathematical analysis. We also describe an open source kernel implementation of SPBM that has been successfully deployed on hand-held computers

Structured Peer-to-Peer Overlay Deployment on MANET: A Survey

There are many common characteristics between Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks and Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET). Self-organization, decentralization, dynamicity and changing topology are the most shared features. Furthermore, when used together, the two approaches complement each other. P2P overlays provide data storage/retrieval functionality, and their routing information can complement that of MANET. MANET provides wireless connectivity between clients without depending on any pre-existing infrastructure. The aim of this paper is to survey current P2P over MANET systems. Specifically, this paper focuses on and investigates structured P2P over MANET. Overall, more than thirty distinct approaches have been classified into groups and introduced in tables providing a structured overview of the area. The survey addresses the identified approaches in terms of P2P systems, MANET underlay systems and the performance of the reviewed systems

A Distributed Routing Algorithm for Internet-wide Geocast

Geocast is the concept of sending data packets to nodes in a specified geographical area instead of nodes with a specific address. To route geocast messages to their destination we need a geographic routing algorithm that can route packets efficiently to the devices inside the destination area. Our goal is to design an algorithm that can deliver shortest path tree like forwarding while relying purely on distributed data without central knowledge. In this paper, we present two algorithms for geographic routing. One based purely on distance vector data, and one more complicated algorithm based on path data. In our evaluation, we show that our purely distance vector based algorithm can come close to shortest path tree performance when a small number of routers are present in the destination area. We also show that our path based algorithm can come close to the performance of a shortest path tree in almost all geocast situations