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