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

A Taxonomy of Self-configuring Service Discovery Systems

We analyze the fundamental concepts and issues in service discovery. This analysis places service discovery in the context of distributed systems by describing service discovery as a third generation naming system. We also describe the essential architectures and the functionalities in service discovery. We then proceed to show how service discovery fits into a system, by characterizing operational aspects. Subsequently, we describe how existing state of the art performs service discovery, in relation to the operational aspects and functionalities, and identify areas for improvement

Effective Multicast Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Most of the multicast routing protocols depend on creation of multicast tree for the transmission of packet from source to destination, which leads to maintain states of the neighboring node and it incures more cost. Maintaining the states of nodes also increases communication and processing overhead as well as requires more amount of memory. Almost all protocols maintain the path list in their routing table which also increases overhead while routing the packets. In this paper we developed a stateless receiver-based multicast routing protocol that includes a list of the multicast destination members addresses (sinks), added in packet headers, to enable receivers to decide the best way to forward the multicast traffic

Zone Based Multi-Path Disjoint Routing In Manet Using Zbmdr Protocol

A MANET (Mobile Ad hoc Network) is an accumulation of wireless mobile nodes which are autonomous and can dynamically self-organize that creates aprovisional network topology. Numerouspossible applications of MANETs necessitate group communications among several nodes, which is supported by multicasting. In a dynamic environment, it is difficult to maintain group membership management, which is a challenging task to implement robust and scalable multicast routing. For that reason, a novel Zone Based Multipath Disjoint Routing (ZBMDR) is proposed. The proposed ZBMDR is disjoint at the zones which can establish multiple zone disjoint routes between the source and the destination network zones which help to develop the network lifetime and also to reduce the congestion and communication overhead. The proposed ZBMDR protocol is simulated using the NS-2 (NS-2.39) and the experimental results are presented

A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

Distributed Service Discovery for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Service discovery in heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks is a challenging research objective, due to the inherent limitations of sensor nodes and their extensive and dense deployment. The protocols proposed for ad hoc networks are too heavy for sensor environments. This paper presents a resourceaware solution for the service discovery problem, which exploits the heterogeneous nature of the sensor network and alleviates the high-density problem from the flood-based approaches. The idea is to organize nodes into clusters, based on the available resources and the dynamics of nodes. The clusterhead nodes act as a distributed directory of service registrations. Service discovery messages are exchanged among the nodes in the distributed directory. The simulation results show the performance of the service discovery protocol in heterogeneous dense environments

Secure Routing Environment with Enhancing QoS in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

A mobile adhoc network is infrastructure-free and self configured network connected without wire. As it is infrastructure-free and no centralized control, such type of network are suitable only for conditional inter communication link. So initially maintaining Quality of Service and security aware routing is a difficult task. The main purpose of QoS aware routing is to find an optimal secure route from source to destination which will satisfy two or more QoS constrain. In this paper, we propose a net based multicasting routing scheme to discovery all possible secure path using Secure closest spot trust certification protocol (SCSTC) and the optimal link path is derived from Dolphin Echolocation algorithm (DEA). The numerical result and performance analysis clearly describe that our provided proposal routing protocol generates better packet delivery ratio, decreases packet delay reduces overhead in secured environment