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

Early congestion detection and adaptive routing in MANET

AbstractAd hoc mobile networks are composed of mobile nodes communicating through wireless medium, without any fixed backbone infrastructure. In these networks, congestion occurs in any intermediate node when data packets travel from source to destination and they incur high packet loss and long delay, which cause the performance degradations of a network. This paper proposes an early congestion detection and adaptive routing in MANET called as EDAPR. Initially EDAPR constructs a NHN (non-congested neighbors) neighbors list and finds a route to a destination through an NHN node. All the primary path nodes periodically calculate its queue_status at node level. While using early congestion detection technique, node detects congestion that is likely to happen and sends warning message to NHN nodes. The ancestor NHN node is aware of this situation and finds an alternate path to a destination immediately by applying adaptive path mechanism. Thus, EDAPR improves performance in terms of reducing delay, routing overhead and increases packet delivery ratio without incurring any significant additional cost. The performance of EDAPR was compared with EDAODV and EDCSCAODV using the Ns-2 simulator. The result reveals significant improvement over EDAODV and EDCSCAODV routing schemes