Secure Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to the service providers. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi networks, with each access point (AP) connected to the wired network, in WMNs only a subset of the APs are required to be connected to the wired network. The APs that are connected to the wired network are called the Internet gateways (IGWs), while the APs that do not have wired connections are called the mesh routers (MRs). The MRs are connected to the IGWs using multi-hop communication. The IGWs provide access to conventional clients and interconnect ad hoc, sensor, cellular, and other networks to the Internet. However, most of the existing routing protocols for WMNs are extensions of protocols originally designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and thus they perform sub-optimally. Moreover, most routing protocols for WMNs are designed without security issues in mind, where the nodes are all assumed to be honest. In practical deployment scenarios, this assumption does not hold. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of security issues in WMNs and then particularly focuses on secure routing in these networks. First, it identifies security vulnerabilities in the medium access control (MAC) and the network layers. Various possibilities of compromising data confidentiality, data integrity, replay attacks and offline cryptanalysis are also discussed. Then various types of attacks in the MAC and the network layers are discussed. After enumerating the various types of attacks on the MAC and the network layer, the chapter briefly discusses on some of the preventive mechanisms for these attacks.Comment: 44 pages, 17 figures, 5 table

A Review of the Energy Efficient and Secure Multicast Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

This paper presents a thorough survey of recent work addressing energy efficient multicast routing protocols and secure multicast routing protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). There are so many issues and solutions which witness the need of energy management and security in ad hoc wireless networks. The objective of a multicast routing protocol for MANETs is to support the propagation of data from a sender to all the receivers of a multicast group while trying to use the available bandwidth efficiently in the presence of frequent topology changes. Multicasting can improve the efficiency of the wireless link when sending multiple copies of messages by exploiting the inherent broadcast property of wireless transmission. Secure multicast routing plays a significant role in MANETs. However, offering energy efficient and secure multicast routing is a difficult and challenging task. In recent years, various multicast routing protocols have been proposed for MANETs. These protocols have distinguishing features and use different mechanismsComment: 15 page

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

Study on QoS support in 802.11e-based multi-hop vehicular wireless ad hoc networks

Multimedia communications over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) will play an important role in the future intelligent transport system (ITS). QoS support for VANET therefore becomes an essential problem. In this paper, we first study the QoS performance in multi-hop VANET by using the standard IEEE 802.11e EDCA MAC and our proposed triple-constraint QoS routing protocol, Delay-Reliability-Hop (DeReHQ). In particular, we evaluate the DeReHQ protocol together with EDCA in highway and urban areas. Simulation results show that end-to-end delay performance can sometimes be achieved when both 802.11e EDCA and DeReHQ extended AODV are used. However, further studies on cross-layer optimization for QoS support in multi-hop environment are required

Supplementing an AD-HOC Wireless Network Routing Protocol with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have a broad and varied range of applications, yet all of these are limited by the resources available to the sensor nodes that make up the WSN. The most significant resource is energy. A WSN may be deployed to an inhospitable or unreachable area, leaving it with a non-replenishable power source. This research examines a way of reducing energy consumption by augmenting the nodes with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that contain routing information. It was expected that RFID tags would reduce the network throughput, the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing traffic sent, and the amount of energy consumed. However, the results show that RFID tags have little effect on the network throughput or the AODV routing traffic sent. They also increase ETE delays in sparse networks as well as the amount of energy consumed in both sparse and dense networks. Furthermore, there was no statistical difference in the amount of user data throughput received. The density of the network is shown to have an effect on the variation of the data but the trends are the same for both sparse and dense networks. This counter-intuitive result is explained, and conditions for such a scheme to be effective are discussed

A Survey of Security Challenges and Issues in Manet

Nodes intriguing element in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are predictable to hold to the rules stated by the routing protocol utilized in the network. Safe routing protocols endeavor to decrease the ill-effect of nodes under the control of malicious entities who intentionally violate the protocol.. There are so many generic tools which are universal for individual as well as organizations for customers to offer protection which comprises Antivirus, Ant spam, etc., and network securities have turn into important issue in MANET. Security is one of the major issues in the MANET particularly w.r.t. complexity and size of the network. The main focus of this survey is to discuss & represent special characteristics of security in MANET and also apply several of the solutions security threats within MANET network similar to intruder activities, tapping and integrity, MANET link layer and network layer operations w.r.t. information security etc) w.r.t. MANET network. This Survey paper also discusses different number of security scenarios of MANET, Attacks in MANET and IDS in MANET. Keywords: AODV, MANET, Network Security, IDS, Attack